Republican Mitt Romney wants to burnish his foreign policy image with a trip to Britain, Poland and Israel this week, but I wonder if seven days off the campaign trail is really worth it. I mean, seriously. Poland?
All candidates want to practice looking presidential overseas, but not all face the level of scrutiny that Romney faces over his tax returns. More than half of Americans, especially independent voters, say Romney should release more than a year’s worth, according to a new Gallup poll. Top Republicans, including Ron Paul, Haley Barbour and Rick Perry, have said ditto. Even the right’s leading journal of opinion, The National Review, has said withholding tax filings is somewhat daft:
Romney protests that he is not legally obliged to release any tax returns. Of course not. He is no longer in the realm of the private sector, though, where he can comply with the letter of the law with the Securities and Exchange Commission and leave it at that. Perceptions matter.
That’s an understatement. Perceptions often matter, rightly or wrongly, more than anything, but the Romney campaign frequently appears indifferent to them. While Romney is in London, for instance, he plans to watch his horse “dance” in the dressage competition at the Summer Olympics (he claimed a $77,000 tax deduction in 2010 for that horse, which is probably worth hundreds of thousands of dollars). And last week, in an interview with ABC, Ann Romney managed to defend her husband’s decision not to release more tax records while also fueling the perception that he’s too rich for the common folk:
“We’ve given all you people need to know and understand about our financial situation and how we live our life” [italics deliciously mine].
At the same time, President Barack Obama’s job approval rating has made three straight quarterly gains, to 46.8 percent, since spring 2011. Gallup’s average for Obama is 49 percent; his job approval is now the highest it’s been since the last quarter of 2010, and it’s higher than George W. Bush’s was in the run-up to the 2004 election. Plus, it’s gone up in a period in which it went down for one-term presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. So Romney might use his time best by hammering Obama on the economy, his weakness, instead of dodging tax questions to watch a dancing horse in jolly-old England.
Romney has done little to encourage the view that he has anything new to say about foreign affairs. This is partly because he’s running a campaign strictly focused on a struggling economy. This is partly because much of what he does say sounds very Bush-like or worse — like his worldview is comically steeped in the rhetoric of the Cold War. The candidate has called Russia our No. 1 foe. His advisers worry about countries like Czechoslovakia. He seems to think Cuba is a clear and present danger. This is not good.
Obama, by contrast, has a foreign-affairs record that can only be beaten with lies. He ordered the withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan. He influenced, with a combination hard and soft power, insurrections in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. And, of course, he did the one thing that Bush was supposed to do — kill Osama bin Laden, the terrorist responsible more than 3,000 American deaths on 9/11.
More importantly, Obama’s is an internationalist doctrine that views the U.S. as a coach and partner in a world in which it cannot conceivably sustain its previous role as global cop. This outrages the rightist punditocracy but it was no less refreshing to many Americans after eight years of Bush’s hope to spread freedom at the point of a gun. If there was any credibility to neoconservatism, it died in Iraq.
It should be said that Obama’s hands are hardly clean. He has proven eager to deploy drone weaponry to kill in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. His targets have included an American citizen and Muslim cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, who allegedly worked for al-Qaida. The drone attack also killed his teenaged son, who was born in the U.S. In fact, anyone of military age standing near a military target is officially considered an enemy combatant. This, along with the so-called “kill list” of possible drone targets, indefinite detention and rendition of suspects sound all sorts human-rights alarms, just as they did during the Bush years, but this is, as during the Bush years, unlikely to grow into political liability.
One could argue that Obama did what Bush did only “better” and without destabilizing diplomatic global relations. That poses an interesting question: How does Romney look like a Republican statesman when the Democrat in office keeps stealing his thunder? One answer: Get more hawkish about Israel. The right has blasted Obama for not visiting the country, which is why Romney pledged during the primary to make Israel his first overseas destination upon becoming president. This week, the Obama campaign promised to visit during his second term while drawing an apt comparison between Obama and Republicans of yore.
Ronald Reagan never went to Israel, and George H.W. Bush went during his second term, a spokesman told reporters on Monday. “Obviously you didn’t hear Republicans complaining then,” he said. Indeed, perhaps they complain because these days it’s up to the Democrat to act like a Republican.