US Policy, Obama, and The Hebrew Republic
Today, 9/11, seems the right day to ask how American foreign policy, and the Middle East conflict particularly, are playing out in the presidential campaign. What, if anything, can Barack Obama do to frame the conversation and, not coincidentally, get himself elected?
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which we have been discussing in this space over the past few days, may seem a side issue here. It is not. Obama himself made the case when he returned from the region in July that any US advance toward diplomatic normalization with Iran, or toward a regional alliance to help out in Iraq, would be tied-up in large measure with Israeli-Palestinian peace. It is a matter of hearts and minds in the greater Arab world.
Moreover, as many of us have argued, the US is the key to any future deal. Given the strength of the Israeli right (and the vendetta culture of Israelis and Palestinians more generally), we cannot expect an Israeli leader to rally an incipient Israeli majority to an actual deal, that is, risk undermining national solidarity for a long while--not unless an American administration and Europe together force the issue, offering a larger, plausible vision, boots on the ground, new investment, and so forth.
Rightist notions like "the global war on terror" have shown how Israel's conflicts are consonant with America's. The Israeli government's ambivalence about ending its occupation, its default to military force, its tensions with Iran, etc., have seemed a kind of US policy agenda in microcosm. And if America approaches its Middle East problems, as Obama insists it must, not with military preemption but with an emphasis on collective security, patient alliances, containment, the power of the global economy, and so forth, how can this not imply a verdict on Israeli occupation?
The question is, will undecided Americans believe Obama's larger logic unless he hammers away at it? John McCain seems to think the status quo just needs more effort: he's unscrewed Brent Scowcroft from his brain and screwed in Joe Lieberman. But has Obama really made the case for a different way of being in the world? Yes and no, as Tom Friedman complained yesterday, and this is a serious danger not only to Obama's prospects, but to a region that more Manichean talk and military stalemate can blow up.
Review the bidding. When McCain speaks of Obama's lack of experience (the main line of attack from an otherwise vulnerable campaign), this is code for something like the following argument:
The world is dangerous, with fanatic forces challenging the US (and, by implication, the West) at every turn. We need a Commander-in-Chief who will not flinch from using force, if necessary; someone whose toughness is clear to all, and so deters attack; someone who can tell right from wrong, and rally the right against the wrong; somebody who, if he had been president, would have run the Iraq war (and by implication, maybe even the Vietnam war) more successfully; somebody whose life experience makes him plausibly the custodian of American patriotism and so deserves our trust.
Granted, this argument is vexingly simple-minded. But the debate it invites is a permanent feature of the American landscape (and everybody's psyche since high-school) and Obama can neither avoid it nor win it. He can say, assertively, that Iraq was a strategic failure. He can promise to refocus on Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. He can say that he cares more about veterans, because he will really fund VA hospitals and a new GI Bill. He can insist he is not really "young," that he is older now than, for example, Kennedy was when he took office. He can say, like Kennedy, that he represents a "new generation" against the old. None of this is enough. It is begging the question and playing into McCain's hands.
For if it is true that the world reduces to a place where outlaws need our posses, Obama cannot be a more plausible John Wayne than McCain. Indeed, what President Kennedy meant by "new generation" in 1960 was vaguely like what McCain implies now about himself, that (unlike the skittish Nixon) Kennedy represented a generation of chastened war veterans who saw how the country must be mobilized around democratic principles, etc., to defeat the Soviets: a big, inchoate enemy with the worldwide capacity to threaten us. (McCain has reassigned this role to Islamists; and Obama may focus on Al-Qaeda's resurgence because of Iraq, or gamely try to refocus us on the economy. But leave the foreign policy debate as it is stands, and any new terror attack between now and November could sweep McCain into the presidency.)
Indeed, the Obama campaign must assume, if only as a thought experiment, that there will be a serious attack on America between now and the election (God forbid), and that Obama will have offered ordinary citizens a strategy, a vision, that allows them to feel that they are working toward security in the face of the uncertainty attacks evoke.
There will soon be three head-to-head debates. To win the election Obama must convincingly win the foreign policy piece; and to do that he must change the terms of debate. He must redefine the world's challenges in a way that demands what he is uniquely equipped to become: a president with, not just the power to deter, but the power to attract. He must, that is, show how terrorism is but a piece of a larger, complex challenge; that in the face of this challenge, we need the ability to 1) build out a system of collective security with other countries, 2) develop regional alliances in all parts of the world based on the common interest of regional players, Middle East, Asia, and Africa, 3) build global institutions for a patently global economy, and 4) win the hearts and minds of young people from Rio to Jakarta.
And to get here, he must show that he is, say, picking up where President Kennedy left off in his famous American University speech, while acknowledging changes in the world people of Kennedy's generation and temperament would have wished for but never lived to see.
Obama must prove, in short, that he is the new face of this globalization. He needs to show, in speech after speech, that America cannot simply aspire to securing our own national interest with military hegemony, but rather that America's interests are inextricably bound with the new world system implied by the world "globalization"; that we can use our (still) unrivaled economic power, and indispensable military power, to turn America into the world's leading global citizen. He must turn his crowd in Berlin from a queer embarrassment into the triumph it was.
Citizenship implies many things, and Kennedy actually listed several that can still be borrowed, from collective security, to nuclear disarmament, to increasing cooperation on the information infrastructure. Obama might culminate with an agenda that carries high symbolic value, which could be initiated in the first 100 days.
Here are some ideas, other than those Obama has offered on Iraq: Strengthening and updating the UN Security Council, by adding permanent members like Germany and Brazil; ordering a radical reduction in nuclear stockpiles, and using projected savings over time to build high-speed rail in major air corridors now fouling the atmosphere; hosting a Kyoto-style conference on climate change, to be led by Al Gore; creating a commission on national service that will revive the Peace Corps.
And, yes, Obama should announce that he will appoint a special negotiator to the Israel-Palestinian talks, perhaps Bill Clinton, and in any case announce that he sees the "Clinton Bridging Parameters" of January 2001 as the basis for American policy in reaching a compromise.
McCain and Republicans will accuse him of ignoring people back home, or caring too much about what the world says. Let them. Voters should see how he excites the world, and how he is raising hopes--and reviving the love of America--everywhere.
(One last thing, a haunting song about 9/11, which might be thought a kind of theme song for the tough-minded humanism Obama will have to defend; you can find out more about the singer here.)
September 11, 2008 1:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
To the extent the election hinges on foreign policy and national security at all, it will be a referendum on the Iraq War. In the end the candidates are going to be asking the public to pronounce a historical judgment on the Iraq War – yea or nay. Obama needs to frame this judgment to make it as simple and direct as possible. John McCain and the Republican Party are seen by the public as defenders of the war; Barack Obama and Democrats are seen as opponents of the war. Obama needs to keep it that way, and constantly and continually remind voters why the Iraq War was a terrible, awful mistake, why they should pronounce a nay judgment on the Iraq War, and why they should use their votes to punish the party that brought us the war.
Many Democratic commentators, in the traditional media and in the blogosphere, have lost that focus and have gotten tied up in a debate about more recent events, events such as the surge. Just the other day, a writer on Democracy Arsenal wrote yet another article on the surge, and endeavored to show that the lessening of violence from the surge is not so much due to the surge itself, as to other initiatives that predate the beginning of the surge. But from a political point of view, obsessing about these kinds of debates is still missing the forest for the trees, and missing it badly. The general public doesn't care if the reduction in violence is due to The Surge alone, or due to The Surge Plus The Awakenings and Some Other Stuff. The problem is that all of those things are seen as things that Bush, Petraeus and other officers under presidential command did in Iraq, so to the extent any of these initiatives are seen as a success, they will be seen as something Bush did right. So Democrats really need to stop arguing so much about the surge and the last two years, and focus a lot more on the whole war and the last seven years.
The Republicans are now trying to frame and sell a victory narrative about the Iraq War, and I have been dismayed that Democrats do not seem to see the narrative that is taking shape, and are not effectively countering it. So far, this is what the broader public probably understands about the contrasting positions:
Republicans: The Iraq War was a good war, and it's a damn good thing we fought it. It took us a little longer to win it than we would have liked, but with the success of surge we have finally won the war. This proves we were right all along! Democrats are cowardly loser defeatists.
Democrats: The surge helped make some a bad situation better, but the Iraq War was a bad war and should never have been fought. It was a national disaster, and it's the Republican’s fault. Bush authored the disaster, and McCain was on board. And now he wants to continue the same policies and approach that brought us that disaster.
The problem, as I see it, is that the Democrats, possibly because of some deep internal ideological divisions in the party over foreign policy, are failing so far to articulate a really compelling, really simple and easily grasped account of why exactly the war was a bad war. And yet, this political task should be so damned easy! The majority of the American public appears to have decided, for the time being at least, that the war was a bad mistake. And they are looking for a candidate who will champion their position with force and vigor, and give clear and concise voice to their inchoate criticisms. But for some reason the Democratic campaign does not seem to want to rely on the harsh truths about Iraq that are most compelling to the general public, but has instead gotten way, way too subtle and “nuanced”. And the public repudiation of the war will not stand for long if the Republicans are able to continue running their Iraq victory narrative while we hear such confused and inconsistent opposition to that narrative from Democrats.
The Democratic campaign is now relying heavily on the idea that the war was a mistake because it "distracted" us from Afghanistan, Pakistan and the broader war on terror. But while this account may carry some weight with certain audiences, I'm not sure how much overall traction it gets. It seems hard to make the case to ordinary observers that the Iraq War has seriously damaged the war on terror, given that we haven't been hit with a major terrorist attack in the US since 9/11 of 2001. Obama needs a short, sweet, forceful and much more compelling answer to the question, "Why should we never have fought the Iraq War?" And it shouldn’t be an answer that just leaves people with doubts or reservations about the war. It needs to be a clear, outraged, waffle-free repudiation of the war, and a corresponding “j’accuse” leveled at Bush and the Republicans.
My sense is that if you ask ordinary Americans who have rejected the war, as polls show most have, what they think was so bad about the Iraq War, the answer goes something like this:
1. The war cost an absolute fortune and has burdened us with massive debt;
2. The war killed and maimed thousands of good American soldiers;
3. Iraq is a shithole country on which we have no business wasting all these lives and treasure unless we have to do it to defend ourselves against dangerous bad guys;
But,
4. There were no WMDs in Iraq, and there was no Al Qaeda connection with Saddam, even though Bush deceived some of us into thinking the opposite in 2002 and 2003. So we spent in excess of a trillion bucks and killed all of those great American boys (and girls) for no good reason. This is criminal!
Again, this should be an easy political task. Commanders who through a combination of incompetence and deception wreck our treasury and kill thousands of people who didn’t need to die are criminally rotten bastards, and should be removed post haste. And the supporters, accomplices and political allies of these reprobates should not then be handed the office that we take away from the dismissed cretins. Case closed.
Well, it should be case closed. But here is where Obama and the Democratic Party are being held back by a gang of wishy-washy advisers and pundits from the elite Democratic foreign policy establishment, advisers and pundits who do not share the mainstream public perception on the war, but are compromised by attitudes that run too close to the Republicans they hesitantly and ineffectively criticize on tactical side issues that are not the central point.
Most ordinary Americans judge our wars by selfish national defense criteria. They think we should fight wars when necessary to defend ourselves, and fight to win, but should save our money and the precious lives of our soldiers when the war is not necessary to defend ourselves. But elite foreign policy experts often don't share the values of ordinary Americans, and many are deeply out of touch with what ordinary Americans are thinking. Most of these experts have plenty of money, and don't know anyone who came home in a body bag or missing a leg or an eye, and they therefore think there are all sorts of very excellent reasons to spend a fortune and kill thousands of our guys, reasons that have nothing to do with defending the United States and its people in any urgent way, but are drawn from various other refined moral and ideological objectives - like removing one crappy dictator from one crappy foreign country, or enlarging the "liberal world system", or something of that sort. Since money and lives are no object for these pampered elitists, the latter have to come up with lots of more complicated and more iffy reasons for opposing an obviously stupid war. They prefer grandiose reasons, for example, such as the story that the war was a mere tactical misstep in the "good fight" that we must fight with "all our might", a blunder in the megalomaniacal world crusade to stamp out non-Americanism wherever it is found, and to stuff the liberal democratic world system into every orifice in the global body.
Let's get back to basics here! The Iraq War was an absurd, unwarranted and criminally wasteful venture. It was a very bad war. That Bad Iraq War is sitting right there on a tee for us. It is very frustrating that the Obama campaign so far refuses to knock it out of the park.
The election will probably hinge on a simple thumbs up vs. thumbs down debate on the Iraq War. Republicans are going for a big thumbs up. If Democrats fail to go bold with a hearty, forceful and indignant thumbs down, and go instead for a wavering thumb flopping up and down, or a thumb pointing off on some tangent, or several thumbs pointing every which way, they will lose!
September 11, 2008 2:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
It is impossible not to be grateful for a comment this compelling, and (for what it's worth) I agree with much of it. But a president has to be able to talk about the next crisis, not only the last one, that is, talk about how we create reasonable safety in a world which, at least since Thomas Hobbes, we know to be vulnerable to extremists and sociopaths. It is not enough to say the Bush administration was, as Dukakis said about Reagan, incompetent. We need a larger vision that shows how (again, Hobbes) collective security is more sensible than going in with guns blazing. It is a vision in which Obama is the natural leader, where we need a diplomat-in-chief, not just a commander-in-chief.
September 11, 2008 3:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
Granted, this argument is vexingly simple-minded. But the debate it invites is a permanent feature of the American landscape (and everybody's psyche since high-school) and Obama can neither avoid it nor win it.
I don't I agree with this. Obama simply has got to win this debate, and shouldn't be afraid of it. He needs to go right after McCain and hit him hard where he lives. He can and must do much more than convince people he will be a better manager of some new world of complex, interconnected, nuanced, ambiguous and non-military power relations. No. He needs to convince people flat out that he will be a better commander-in-chief than McCain, and that if military action is needed, they want Obama, not McCain, to head it up.
Obama shouldn't dance around McCain and the military dimension of the national security issues, or float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. He needs to move right in tight and knock that phony, swaggering old fool on his keester, along with his puffed up Old Soldier press releases.
I sure know I would prefer Obama to McCain in case of war. Obama is smarter; he's cooler under pressure; he's a better decision maker; he's a clearer thinker; and he's his own man. McCain is an impetuous, loose talking, cloudy thinking old fool who may be good at getting shot down, but has never commanded anything to victory. And he's run by lobbyists and advisers who are there to cover up his incompetence and fill in the massive gaps in his own comprehension of global affairs.
Obama has to be careful about the language he uses. But he has to be aggressive about this, and not afraid of offending some people at first. He and his supporters need to find a way to communicate the following harsh but accurate messages about McCain, even if they do it with tactful language:
1. McCain is a moron who finished fifth from the bottom of his class at Annapolis. He is another tough-talking but dumb-walking fool, just like Bush. And we know how Bush turned out. McCain might have "learned to love his country" in prison camp. But he didn't get a brain transplant there.
2. McCain is an ambitious dandy who dumped his first wife to marry upward, and is now a kept man. Not only can't he manage a nation's national security budget, he clearly isn't even on top of his own family's budget. He wears fancy shoes, is driven everywhere in fancy cars, and doesn't even know how many houses his rich wife has provided for him.
3. McCain has a history of shooting from the hip, and saying and doing stupid things. He is, it is true, quite excellent at apologizing for mistakes and taking things back. But there aren't many do-overs in the oval office, and we need a guy who gets it right the first time.
4. McCain gets props for enduring torture for his country. But nothing in McCain's military record shows he has the right stuff to be a steady and competent commander.
5. Lieutenant McCain's most recent major decision was to name a vice presidential running mate who, let's face it, is simply not cut out for for heading up America's global affairs and national security portfolio. McCain might think he is going to live forever, but he is an old man. If he is elected, that puts Sarah Palin a broken hip or a stroke away from the helm of the ship of state. Yikes.
6. McCain is a tired and easily distracted old man. He lacks the necessary vigor and stamina for the job.
Obama can sell this argument. He and his supporters can get people to cut through the POW publicity department nonsense, and Country First atmospherics and posturing, and see the inadequate man beneath them.
And Obama has to do this. Here's why: Bush will probably manufacture some kind of October surprise before this election season is up. Maybe it will be a big one, like bombing Iran. Maybe it will be a smaller, but still scary, crisis like an incident with a Chinese plane or Russian ship. At that point, a lot of people will make a gut level decision about who they want in the oval office when similar unpredictable shit hits other unforeseen fans after January, 2009. We want their guts to swing toward Obama. We want them to conclude that they don't want McCain in charge.
Again, Obama can make this case. He can make it because it is clearly true. People will get it.
September 11, 2008 3:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
If Obama takes your advice, jerk, he'll have a long time to rue it as a has-been candidate. Sheer stupidity. He needs to constantly reassure me and my friends that people who think like you about Israel will have asbsolutely no place in his State Department or National Security Council.
September 11, 2008 4:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
I love you, aipacmember. No really, I absolutely do.
You are unfailingly honest about the reasons that Obama has to tippietoe around about FP when it comes to the ME. I have seen you say similiar things about who "you and your friends" will allow Obama to have as advisors, but this is the first time I've seen you expand your areas of influence to vetting who Obama choses to have staffing the State Department and the National Security Council.
What do you think of Avishai's suggestion that Bill Clinton be appointed as a sort of uber envoy to talks between the I/P parties? I would think you may be torn, as Dennis Ross seems the most likely choice (for you and your friends) to handle that brief. Perhaps that conflict of interest could be solved by Ross as SoS and Clinton could be a Tony Blair type on steroids. They could, in a sense, reprise their old roles, sort of like a defunct rockband reunting for another tour.
That would at least insure continuity and that nothing upsets the traditional equilibrium.
Avishai, I think, is on your side in as far as suggesting that the same actors (sans the UN?) who make up the Quartet be tasked with handling the I/P portfolio and then some:
"not unless an American administration and Europe together force the issue, offering a larger, plausible vision, boots on the ground, new investment, and so forth."
I'm not too sure what he means by "boots on the ground", though. So, I will have to assume that Avishai envisions American/European military assets deployed in the Palestinian territories; sort of a ramped-up UNIFIL with different rules of engagement under a NATO umbrella, perhaps?
Thanks to Fallujah and Baghdad et al, we Americans now have plenty of hands-on experience with how to do a 21st century occupation.
That scenario would certainly excite the al-AQ Salafist types whose increasing numbers are causing such alarm in the ME .
Sitting Crusader targets served up for their holy jihad pleasure and no more Hamas to interfere with their freedom of action in the OTs!
September 11, 2008 7:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think my current focus is just different than yours, Bernard. I understand that you have a new book, and are anxious to talk about it. But there is an incredibly important presidential election less than two months away. Those of us who pay a lot of attention to US foreign policy, and that includes many of the readers of this blog, have all been debating large foreign policy visions for several years now. We have had many such discussions in this forum, and I suspect most of us now have fairly settled views and fairly well-developed personal visions of the futures we would prefer. I know who is getting my vote, and I take it you do to. So do almost all the other people here.
But there are not a few people out there in America who are undecided. Those people might not all have a grand vision of an alternative future. But they know what they think about certain very salient events and issues. A lot of them think Iraq, the defining American action and reality of the past six years, and the episode that will likely get the lion's share of the attention in the history books, was a really, really, really big mistake. A candidate's view on Iraq may thus be decisive for them, and an index of how much they should trust him. If they can be made to realize that only one of the candidates shares their judgment about the huge Iraq mistake, and if they also come to believe that the candidate thinks Iraq was a mistake because he has instincts and values that match their own, then they might be induced to place their trust in him on all of the other foreign policy issues about which they don't have settled opinions.
One problem with promoting the diplomat-in-chief approach, as I see it, is that much of the public appears to have very conflicted opinions about foreigners. They say in polls that they are very worried about our reputation abroad, and want a president who can fix that problem. But many seem to want the next president to accomplish this magic fix-up job without visiting or being noticeably friendly with any actual foreigners. Obama's trip to the Middle East and Europe, which was a diplomatic triumph according to reports from other countries, seems to have hurt Obama as much as helped him here at home. A lot of American's are very provincial, think our ways are different from foreign ways, and might therefore be suspicious of candidates who are international superstars - even though another part of them wants a president who is an international superstar, and can charm foreigners into liking us again.
You asked, "What, if anything, can Barack Obama do to frame the conversation and, not coincidentally, get himself elected?" At this point I don't think laying out his comprehensive vision of US foreign policy is the priority. He has been doing that for two years. He has authored articles in Foreign Affairs and other periodicals; he has presented his vision in debates, interviews and more extended forums. Most of the people who are drawn to intellectual debate and are moved by these things have already gotten the picture. He needs something simpler, more compact, more immediately compelling and more emotive for the undecided remainder.
I personally think Obama should be running a version of the anti-Goldwater campaign of 1964, complete with something like a version of the daisy commercial. The message should be that McCain has the same extreme and wrongheaded views and as Bush, along with similar personal deficiencies, and that a vote for McCain is a vote for a continuation of the Bush disaster of the past 92 months: a vote for more bad wars, more dead Americans, and a more deeply ruined treasury. He needs to remind voters forcefully and frequently why they have rejected the Bush-McCain approach. The only positive vision he needs to present for these voters is that of a return to competence, ordinary intelligence and common sense, after eight years of wingnutty fanaticism, lying and deadly blundering.
September 11, 2008 11:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
I disagree with your implication that the Peace Corps is moribund. It's certainly larger, more relevant and more diverse* than when it deployed me to Kenya.
* -- in the services it provides. I don't know anything about diversity. We had a reasonable number of gays, blacks and elderly when I joined in 1989.
September 11, 2008 11:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dr Avishai said:
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And, yes, Obama should announce that he will appoint a special negotiator to the Israel-Palestinian talks, perhaps Bill Clinton, and in any case announce that he sees the "Clinton Bridging Parameters" of January 2001 as the basis for American policy in reaching a compromise.
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Wait a minute....didn't Clinton directly inject himself into the negotiations? Didn't he invite Arafat a dozen time to the White House, more than any other foreign leader? Didn't he lock himself and Barak into Camp David with Arafat for weeks and threaten and cajole him to reach an agreement and fail? When did Arafat ever say he accepted the "Clinton Parameters"? When did Abbas ever say he accepted the "Clinton Parameters"? Didn't all of you of the so-called "peace camp" tell us "only Arafat is strong enough to make an agreement" and now he is gone? Didn't HAMAS, who rejects any peace agreement with Israel win the Palestinian parliamentary elections? Didn't HAMAS take over Gaza and earn an equal right to speak for the Palestinians?
Over and over and over we hear the same thing from the 'peace camp'...'if only a President of the US would really weigh in and make an ultimatum to Israel to get out of Judea/Samaria, then there would be peace', totally ignoring the so-called "Right of Return". You members of the "peace camp" can't seem to get it through your heads....the Arabs don't view their interests they way you see it for them. You keep saying "If I was a Palestinian, I would accept the 'Clinton Parameters'". But they aren't you. They view the Clinton Parameters as a humiliating defeat and no Palestinian leader can ever agree to them. They say this clearly, you just refuse to listen. Remember that Arafat told Clinton that if compromised on one of their basic demands (I don't recall if it was Jerusalem or the Right of Return, he would be assassinated? I think it is time you stop making the arrogant assumptions that "everyone in the world must think like I do".
September 12, 2008 3:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
I repeat what I answered Dr Avishai in an earlier thread....my position that it is not possible to reach a contractual peace between Israel and the Arab world as a whole, and the Palestinians in particular, does NOT mean I think the situation is hopeless...far from it, but what must be worked towards is NOT phony "peace agreements" signed with great fanfare and which are immediately violated, but rather an INFORMAL modus vivendi. This will occur ONLY when Israel STOPS making territorial concessions and announces once and for all that it will not give up Jewish rights to live in Judea/Samaria, the ancient homeland of the Jewish people.
The ultimate future of Judea/Samaria is an INFORMAL Jordanian/Israeli condominium, with Jews living under Israeli rule and Arabs living under Jordanian rule, with the Israeli military presence being drawn down as the security situation allows, and free movement being restored to the Arab population such as existed during the pre-Oslo Israeli occupation period. It was Oslo that destroyed the free movement of the Palestinians by allowing Arafat to turn terrorist groups loose in order to make war with Israel.
Once the Arab side sees Israel is serious, Israel is here to stay and that Israel is not interesting in interfering in the culture, society and economic system of the Arabs (all of which Dr Avishai's "secularized, globalized Hebrew Republic" threatens them with), then, hopefully, the Islamic extremist movements will slowly become discredited. Up until now they have been able to say "see, Israel is collapsing, Prime Minister Olmert himself said Israel can't fight any more and is willing to give up Jewish holy places, tough general Sharon expelled Jews from their homes, so we are winning. Just keep up the pressure and violence and they will go under!". The modus vivendi can not occur until that type of thinking is discredited.
September 12, 2008 3:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
Obama should make the campaign all about restoring America's economic leadership. If the race comes down to a debate about who's the better war leader, McCain will win hands down. If you haven't noticed, the Republicans are trying to make the campaign all about war (notice all those images of terrorists in their convention and all the references to war?). And the Democrats are getting sucked in by the Republicans (as usual, being the stupid party).
If Obama wants to win, he should pretty much ignore the war issue and instead create a different debate, which McCain can't win. Restoring economic leadership is the issue for Obama. McCain has already said he doesn't understand economics. And--believe me--even without a Frank Luntz focus group, I can tell you that Americans right now are more afraid of losing their livelihoods than being shot by terrorists. The economy is the primary concern of Americans and it's a losing issue for Republicans. So the Democrats should be making the economy almost the sole focus of their campaign. The Republicans meanwhile will continue to try to make a different issue--war--the main issue of the campaign. Democrats should pretty much ignore them and continue to hammer home on the economy. The Republicans want to shift the battle to a field on which they can win--war and terror. The Democrats should avoid the temptation to chase them to that battlefield and should instead remain firmly planted on the field on which they can easily destroy the Republicans--the economy.
September 12, 2008 8:06 AM | Reply | Permalink