President Barack Obama’s lieutenants prepared for the Oct. 12 Republican debate in Spartanburg, S.C., by lobbing some charges against Gov. Mitt Romney, while declining to target his GOP rivals.
“We’ll hear a lot of bold statements from them, but the most important thing is that Mitt Romney… has no foreign policy credentials,” former U.S. Army general Claudia Kennedy said in a press conference on shortly before the debate.
Kennedy’s verbal attacks are part of a larger strategy to hammer away at Romney, no matter how the other Republican presidential candidates rise and fall in the polls, and no matter how often Obama’s policies have failed to achieve the president’s stated goals.
The strategy is a public-relations effort to level charges at Romney in the hope that they will gradually weaken the former Mass. governor’s reputational potential to become a national leader, among both GOP primary voters and the nation’s swing-voters.
Romney’s staff highlighted the focus on the former governor. “The Democrats are so worried about running against Mitt Romney, they are spending their Saturday night obsessing over him,” said a late night statement from Gail Gitcho, Romney’s communications director.
Kennedy’s criticism was aimed at Romney’s national security policies, but her charges echoed those lobbed by other Democratic talking-heads: that swing voters should not trust Romney to be a leader in difficult times because of his reputation for inconsistency.
Romney “changes his mind and he changes his words when he stands in front of new audiences,” Kennedy said.
“When someone flip-flops on a matter as serious as when to bring out troops home for Afghanistan … it raises serious leadership questions.”
Claim’s of Romney’s weaknesses as a leader have been accompanied by Democrats’ claims of Obama’s strength and effectiveness.
Kennedy, like other Democrats, lauds Obama for attacking al-Qaida and other Islamist political groups.
“I’m pretty sure that al-Qaida doesn’t have any doubt about our president’s resolve,” Kennedy added, while incongruously noting that “the president has declared an end to combat in Iraq … and he continues to draw down forces in Afghanistan.”
Kennedy’s claim that Obama has been successful is questionable, partly because of his failure to push back against Iran and its global belligerence.
For 30 years, and especially since the U.S. removed Iraq’s dictator in 2003, Iran has attacked the United States and its allies. It dispatched gunmen to attack U.S. troops in Iraq, supplies Taliban forces in Afghanistan, and is rushing ahead with the development of a nuclear weapons that will likely spark a new arms race in the Middle East.
Last month, U.S. officials announced that Iran has fomented a plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in Washington D.C.
Obama has remained neutral, even while the Islamic theocratic government bloodily suppressed popular democratic protests in 2009.
When asked about the president’s neutrality then, Kennedy defended him. “It is very important not to lead people into danger if there’s not a way for them to successfully make a protest,” she said. “I know whatever the president’s decision was, it was based on a sense of responsibility and respect for human life.”
Obama, she also insisted, “has said it is not acceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon [and] has mobilized the international community to [impose] the most stringent regime of sanctions that the regime has ever faced.”
“President Obama has shown character and strong leadership,” she asserted. “Mitt Romney continues to change his mind.”