2012 US Presidential Elections

Obama's launch of political attack ads on Romney using the OBL hit job means he has an edge on the terrorism issue against Romney,

The fact that Romney opposed Obama's plan to luanch unilateral air strikes in Pakistan and also opposed spending resources in hunting down OBL back in 2007 is coming back to haunt Romney

Asia Times Online :: Obama wins politics of terror

United States President Barack Obama's strategy of maximizing personal political mileage for his presidential re-election campaign from the killing of Osama bin Laden has sharpened the battlelines in the lead-up to the November elections.

The Washington Post labeled the president a "campaigner in chief", apart from commander-in-chief, on the eve of the first anniversary of the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in which the al-Qaeda chief was killed by US special forces.

The repeated political marketing about Obama as a tough nut on national security issues and contrasts with Republican challenger Mitt Romney's alleged indecisiveness have reversed the tables, as the Republican camp was traditionally seen as more assertive in war and terrorism-related issues while the Democratic Party had a namby-pamby image.

That Obama was no pansy was clear from the very first days after he took office. But he had a monumental task of shrugging off the legacy of Democratic presidents who earned a reputation for bungling on international crises. Romney recently tried to tap into that vein by arguing that Obama did nothing special by ordering the raid of the Navy Seals on Bin Laden's hideout and that "even Jimmy Carter" would have done the same as it was an easy opportunity to take out America's public enemy number one.

President Carter's top-secret attempt to free US diplomats from the hostage crisis in Iran in 1980 and president John F Kennedy's disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 have been peddled as glaring examples of Democratic presidential failures in the security realm.

These are juxtaposed against Republican icon, president Ronald Reagan, who was the poster boy for aggressive foreign policy decision-making that did not hesitate to use force or secure American interests by hook or by crook. Reagan's halo as an iron-fisted leader was inherited by both president George H W Bush (for teaching Iraq's Saddam Hussein a lesson in the Gulf War) and president George W Bush (for relentlessly pressing on with the "war on terror").

But Romney's tactic of placing Obama within the portals of a Democratic presidential legacy of cowardliness does not hold water because Obama has been an unusually savvy decision-maker on national security concerns. Just as his brand of politics while ascending to power in 2008 was a rejection of the establishment line of the Democratic Party, Obama's thinking and acumen on the al-Qaeda threat and on war in general has been much more farsighted than any Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940s.

Contrary to Romney's caricature of the Abbottabad raid as a simple home run, the chances of success in nabbing or assassinating Bin Laden last May were actually "50-50" and Obama grasped a historic opportunity with a degree of optimism and hope. It was exemplary political leadership, wherein the president's own military advisers were unsure whether to go ahead and launch the Navy Seals when intelligence was not absolutely certain that Bin Laden was in the hideout. A civilian like Obama eventually took the decision on his own, based on gut instinct and an inbuilt self-confidence.

Portraying Obama as a wimp on Iran, Syria, China or other major preoccupations of American foreign policy is not cutting much ice.
Rather, the popularity of a new television advertisement by the Democratic Party's propaganda machine, which asks whether Romney - had he been president of the US on May 1, 2011- could have mustered the courage and the conviction to risk his career and US relations with Pakistan in order to find Bin Laden, shows that perceptions of Obama as a historic change agent are not confined to domestic US politics.

He avoids war (or in the case of Afghanistan, tries to de-escalate inherited wars) where it would be counter-productive, but does not hesitate to use surgical military action if there is a reasonable chance of success. In terms of rationality (ie cost-benefit analysis), Obama is proving a far better commander-in-chief than his Republican predecessor.

Some observers have been critical of Obama's attempts to crassly cash in on a collective American achievement such as the assassination of Bin Laden to boost his political fortunes when the economy is showing a "thumbs down".

Is Obama diverting the economically distressed American electorate with macho fables of how Bin Laden and al-Qaeda's core organization were effectively decimated under his command? Is Obama's hyping of Bin Laden's assassination a camouflaging of what is basically a strategic defeat for the US in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

There is indeed a fair bit of political opportunism in Obama's actions, which cannot be denied. But then, terrorism itself is a dangerous form of politically motivated violence. Keeping it out of electoral politics is impossible and unrealistic to even ask for.

Take India, for example. Every time a major terrorist attack shatters peace, a blame game ensues in the hotly contested arena of in India's electoral politics.

The opposition slams the ruling party as inefficient or soft on countering religious fundamentalists and their foreign sponsors, and the roles get reversed when the opposition occupies the treasury benches in parliament.

The independent Indian news media commentators then cry foul and accuse all the parties of "politicizing terror" instead of uniting to tackle the menace. Such calls for de-politicizing terrorism and making counter-terrorism a purely technical problem that has mechanical solutions are misguided and also bereft of comparative insights about how politics inevitably enters debates on terrorism around the world.

Whether for good or bad, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his challenger, the socialist candidate, Francois Hollande, are politicizing terror by accusing each other of failure to understand or tackle the Islamist threat since the Toulouse massacre by the al-Qaeda-inspired Frenchman of Algerian descent, Mohamed Merah. In Spain and Germany, elections have been won or lost on issues of how adeptly an incumbent regime has managed terrorist attacks or foreign military crises.

To wish away politics from the question of counter-terrorism is purely wishful. What Obama is showing through his grandstanding on the Bin Laden scalp is that there is a relationship between citizens and the state based on the understanding that governments protect their people.

The questions of national security, terrorism and war are so integral to citizen's sense of safety that they cannot be left to technocrats or military mavens. Besides the domestic socio-economic welfare issues which dominate discourse on citizen-state relations, national security too remains a central public policy concern in an age where terrorism and war beckon in every direction.

There have been instances in Western history where Prime Ministers and Presidents like Winston Churchill in Britain, Charles de Gaulle in France and George H W Bush in the US lost elections or referendums despite winning wars and heroically leading their countries in times of peril.

The arithmetic which they miscalculated was to expect that under-performance in the domestic welfare state and governance functions would be compensated for by superlative antics in the international arena.

As a community organizer with a strong grassroots base, Obama is not committing that error. He is aware of the deep economic malaise in the US and is trying to recover lost ground in the unemployment and wealth inequality domains. Unlike a Sarkozy or a typical Indian politician, who might be using the terrorism card to stave off defeat triggered by domestic corruption or mismanagement, Obama's brand of politics is conveying that politics is the art of delivering results both on domestic and on foreign policy matters.

Obama's re-election in November is not a foregone conclusion, but his smart politicization of counter-terrorism (in spite of the overall fiasco for the US in the war in Afghanistan) is more or less ensuring that the revolution he has brought to the Democratic Party will become rooted with four more years in the White House.

What are the chances of Romney?

I am sure China would be most discomfited if a Republican comes home to roost!

And India would love it?!

Exploitative NBC Makes Teen Girl Cry in Disgusting Fake News Ratings Ploy | NewsBusters.org

Thanks for sharing Mr. Ewald.

Having been to quite a few states all over the US, I have never seen Mexican homeless people. If my assumptions are correct, even if many of the Mexicans are illegals, I don't see why they should pay taxes, since most of those benefiting out of part of the taxes are not Mexicans. What to say about such tax evasion? Illegal, yes, unethical, no?

If anything, this country needs a lot of hardworking men, not those living on dole-outs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/op...hief.html?_r=1
Peter Bergen

From both the right and left, there has been a continuing, dramatic cognitive disconnect between Mr. Obama’s record and the public perception of his leadership: despite his demonstrated willingness to use force, neither side regards him as the warrior president he is.

THE president who won the Nobel Peace Prize less than nine months after his inauguration has turned out to be one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades.

Liberals helped to elect Barack Obama in part because of his opposition to the Iraq war, and probably don’t celebrate all of the president’s many military accomplishments. But they are sizable.

Mr. Obama decimated Al Qaeda’s leadership. He overthrew the Libyan dictator. He ramped up drone attacks in Pakistan, waged effective covert wars in Yemen and Somalia and authorized a threefold increase in the number of American troops in Afghanistan. He became the first president to authorize the assassination of a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and played an operational role in Al Qaeda, and was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen. And, of course, Mr. Obama ordered and oversaw the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

Ironically, the president used the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech as an occasion to articulate his philosophy of war. He made it very clear that his opposition to the Iraq war didn’t mean that he embraced pacifism — not at all.

“I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people,” the president told the Nobel committee — and the world. “For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man, and the limits of reason.”

If those on the left were listening, they didn’t seem to care. The left, which had loudly condemned George W. Bush for waterboarding and due process violations at Guantánamo, was relatively quiet when the Obama administration, acting as judge and executioner, ordered more than 250 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2009, during which at least 1,400 lives were lost.

Mr. Obama’s readiness to use force — and his military record — have won him little support from the right. Despite countervailing evidence, most conservatives view the president as some kind of peacenik. From both the right and left, there has been a continuing, dramatic cognitive disconnect between Mr. Obama’s record and the public perception of his leadership: despite his demonstrated willingness to use force, neither side regards him as the warrior president he is.

Mr. Obama had firsthand experience of military efficacy and precision early in his presidency. Three months after his inauguration, Somali pirates held Richard Phillips, the American captain of the Maersk Alabama, hostage in the Indian Ocean. Authorized to use deadly force if Captain Phillips’s life was in danger, Navy SEALs parachuted to a nearby warship, and three sharpshooters, firing at night from a distance of 100 feet, killed the pirates without harming Captain Phillips.

“GREAT job,” Mr. Obama told William H. McRaven, the then vice admiral who oversaw the daring rescue mission and later the Bin Laden operation in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The SEAL rescue was the president’s first high-stakes decision involving the secretive counterterrorism units. But he would rely increasingly upon their capacities in the coming years.

Soon after Mr. Obama took office he reframed the fight against terrorism. Liberals wanted to cast anti-terrorism efforts in terms of global law enforcement — rather than war. The president didn’t choose this path and instead declared “war against Al Qaeda and its allies.” In switching rhetorical gears, Mr. Obama abandoned Mr. Bush’s vague and open-ended fight against terrorism in favor of a war with particular, violent jihadists.

The rhetorical shift had dramatic — non-rhetorical — consequences. Compare Mr. Obama’s use of drone strikes with that of his predecessor. During the Bush administration, there was an American drone attack in Pakistan every 43 days; during the first two years of the Obama administration, there was a drone strike there every four days. And two years into his presidency, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning president was engaged in conflicts in six Muslim countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Libya. The man who went to Washington as an “antiwar” president was more Teddy Roosevelt than Jimmy Carter.

Consider the comparative speed with which Mr. Obama and his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, opted for military intervention in various conflicts. Hesitant, perhaps, because of the Black Hawk Down disaster in Somalia in 1993, Mr. Clinton did nothing to stop what, at least by 1994, was evidently a genocidal campaign in Rwanda. And Bosnia was on the verge of genocidal collapse before Mr. Clinton decided — after two years of dithering — to intervene in that troubled area in the mid-1990s. In contrast, it took Mr. Obama only a few weeks to act in Libya in the spring of 2011 when Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi threatened to massacre large portions of the Libyan population. Mr. Obama went to the United Nations and NATO and set in motion the military campaign — roundly criticized by the left and the right — that toppled the Libyan dictator.

None of this should have surprised anyone who had paid close attention to what Mr. Obama said about the use of force during his presidential campaign. In an August 2007 speech on national security, he put the nation — and the world — on alert: “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will,” he said, referring to Pervez Musharraf, then president of Pakistan. He added, “I will not hesitate to use military force to take out terrorists who pose a direct threat to America.”

That’s about as clear a statement as can be. But Republicans and Democrats blasted Mr. Obama with equal intensity for suggesting that he would authorize unilateral military action in Pakistan to kill Bin Laden or other Al Qaeda leaders.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, then a Democratic rival for the presidential nomination, said, “I think it is a very big mistake to telegraph that.” Mitt Romney, vying for the Republican nomination, accused Mr. Obama of being a “Dr. Strangelove” who is “going to bomb our allies.” John McCain piled on: “Will we risk the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate who once suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan?”

Once in office, Mr. Obama signed off on a large increase in the number of C.I.A. officers on the ground in Pakistan and an intensified campaign of drone warfare there; he also embraced the use of drones or covert military units in places like Somalia and Yemen, where the United States was not engaged in traditional land warfare. (Mr. Bush, who first deployed C.I.A.-directed drones, did not do so on the scale that Mr. Obama did; and Mr. Obama, of course, had the benefit of significantly improved, more precise, drone technology.)

Nothing dramatizes Mr. Obama’s willingness to use hard power so well as his decision to send Navy SEAL Team 6 to Abbottabad, to take out Bin Laden. Had this risky operation failed, it would most likely have severely damaged Mr. Obama’s presidency — and legacy.

Mr. Obama’s advisers worried that a botched raid would disturb — or destroy — the United States-Pakistan relationship, which would make the war in Afghanistan more difficult to wage since so much American matériel had to travel through Pakistani airspace or ground routes.

The risks were enormous. A helicopter-borne assault could easily turn into a replay of the debacle in the Iranian desert in 1980, when Mr. Carter authorized a mission to release the American hostages in Tehran that ended with eight American servicemen dead and zero hostages freed.

SOME of Mr. Obama’s top advisers worried that the intelligence suggesting that Bin Laden was in the Abbottabad compound was circumstantial and much too flimsy to justify the risks involved. The deputy C.I.A. director, Michael J. Morell, had told the president that in terms of available data points, “the circumstantial evidence of Iraq having W.M.D. was actually stronger than evidence that Bin Laden was living in the Abbottabad compound.”

At the final National Security Council meeting to consider options connected to Bin Laden’s possible presence in the Abbottabad compound, Mr. Obama gave each of his advisers an opportunity to speak. When the president asked, “Where are you on this? What do you think?” so many officials prefaced their views by saying, “Mr. President, this is a very hard call,” that laughter erupted, providing a few moments of levity in the otherwise tense, two-hour meeting.

Asked his view, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said, “Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go.”

For the president, however, the potential rewards clearly outweighed all risk involved. “Even though I thought it was only 50-50 that Bin Laden was there, I thought it was worth us taking a shot,” he said. “And I said to myself that if we have a good chance of not completely defeating but badly disabling Al Qaeda, then it was worth both the political risks as well as the risks to our men.”

The following morning, on Friday, April 29, at 8:20 a.m. in the White House Diplomatic Reception Room, Mr. Obama gathered his key national security advisers in a semicircle around him and told them simply, “It’s a go.”

Three days later Bin Laden was dead.

The Bin Laden mission will surely resurface in the coming election; the campaign has already produced a 17-minute documentary that showcases the raid. This, combined with Mr. Obama’s record of military accomplishment, will make it hard for Mitt Romney to convince voters that Mr. Obama is a typical, weak-on-national-security Democrat. And, if Mr. Romney tries to portray Mr. Obama this way, he will very likely trap himself into calling for a war with Iran, which many Americans oppose.

Mr. Obama plans to be in Chicago for the NATO summit meeting in late May, just as the election campaign heats up. He’ll arrive knowing that the United States and Afghanistan have already agreed to a long-term strategic partnership that is likely to involve thousands of American soldiers in Afghanistan, in advisory roles, after combat operations end in 2014. (The details of the agreement are still being negotiated.) This should inoculate the president from would-be Romney charges that he is “abandoning” Afghanistan.

None of this suggests that Mr. Obama is trigger-happy or that, when considering the use of force, he is more likely to trust his gut than counsel provided during structured, often lengthy, deliberations with his National Security Council and other advisers. In instances in which the risks seem too great (military action against Iran) or the payoff too murky (some form of military intervention in Syria), Mr. Obama has repeatedly held America’s fire.

This said, it is clear that he has completely shaken the “Vietnam syndrome” that provided a lens through which a generation of Democratic leaders viewed military action. Still, the American public and chattering classes continue to regard the president as a thinker, not an actor; a negotiator, not a fighter.

What accounts for the strange, persistent cognitive dissonance about this president and his relation to military force? Does it stem from the campaign in which Mrs. Clinton repeatedly critiqued Mr. Obama for his stated willingness to negotiate with Iran and Cuba? Or is it because he can never quite shake the deliberative tone and mien of the constitutional law professor that he once was? Or because of his early opposition to the Iraq war? Whatever the causes, the president has embraced SEAL Team 6 rather than Code Pink, yet many continue to see him as the negotiator in chief rather than the warrior in chief that he actually is.

Another $0.50 for Mr. ejazr from the DNC.

I suggest that all articles from NY Times and Washington Post automatically be moved to 2012 US Presidential Election thread.

Otherwise between now and November DFI will be swamped with propaganda from the Democrats.

For those who live in Charlotte, NC (pmaitra for one), the DNC convention 2012 Democratic National Convention will be coming at the end of this month. My sister works in a downtown office building and her employer has told her at that time all parking garages will be closed. A friend of hers was visiting with her 14 year old daughter this week and the daughter tried to take a photo of her mother and my sister in front of her building. A security guard came out and stopped her.

Ron Paul said it right when he refused Secret Service protection in the campaigns. "The govt's job is to protect the liberties of it's citizens more than their physical bodies"

WG,

So, Romney will win?

Something like Mamata Bannerjee?

Projecting as a Peoples' person?

The Democrats will be relying even more on vote fraud this time, so it will be close. The news media have always loved Obama, and that will be another factor in his favor. I would, however be disappointed if Romney does not win. The economy will be totally destroyed after another 4 years like we have had. Then we'll see the rise of the USSA. United Soviet States of America.