Op-Ed Contributor

Romney’s Missing Foreign Policy

By DANIELLE PLETKA

Published: October 7, 2012

IF it hadn’t been for the deadly Sept. 11 attack on the United States Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Mitt Romney probably wouldn’t be giving a speech on foreign policy in the waning weeks of this election season. But Mr. Romney sensed an opening in President Obama’s missteps in Libya, and on Monday he plans to lay out his case that he will be a better steward of America’s national security.

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For an American public fixated on the economy, another Romney valedictory on the advantages of not being Barack Obama will be a waste of time. Americans feel more comfortable when they have a sense of the candidate’s vision, because it gives them a clearer road map for the future.

Mr. Romney must articulate his vision of America’s place in the world in a way that makes sense not only to the American people, but to friends and foes alike. There is a case to be made for a contrast with Mr. Obama. But, thus far, no Republican leader has made it.

Mr. Romney needs to persuade people that he’s not simply a George W. Bush retread, eager to go to war in Syria and Iran and answer all the mail with an F-16. He needs to understand that even though Mr. Obama’s so-called pivot to Asia is more rhetorical flourish than actual policy, it responds to a crying need.

Any new vision for American greatness in the world must flow from an understanding of how the country has changed since 2001. We are still one of the richest nations on earth, but Americans are poorer, war-weary and irritated with what appears to be the ingratitude of nations for which we have sacrificed a great deal in blood and treasure. There are substantial wings of both the Democratic and Republican parties that wish to wash their hands of the world’s troubles.

In that environment, Mr. Romney must give a clear explanation of how American power since the end of World War II provided the foundation for the most prosperous and successful era in human history; how our domination of the world’s most trafficked waterways has permitted the flourishing of trade; and how exporting our principles of political and economic freedom has opened and nourished markets that buy American goods, employ American workers and allow Americans to enjoy an unmatched level of security.

More important, Americans must know that it is not for mercantile benefits alone that the United States has exerted its leadership. It is because there is no other power, and no other people, that can — or, if able, would — exert the benign influence that has characterized our role in the world. Whether you like the Iraq war or hate it; like the battle in Afghanistan or not; believe in the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi or revile it — in no case has the United States intervened for malevolent purposes.

Unfortunately, Mr. Romney hasn’t made that claim. Instead, when asked for specifics, he has outlined an Iran policy that doesn’t differ markedly from Mr. Obama’s. When pressed on what he would do differently in Syria, he has trodden so carefully that he has found himself to the left of his party’s internationalist wing. And he has doubled down on the notion that Russia remains a geostrategic threat, without presenting any persuasive evidence that it is.

It’s not that Mr. Romney does not or cannot offer a more compelling vision of American leadership. Having heard him speak privately, and having met him on a few occasions, I believe he has one. Now is the moment to show it.

Mr. Romney must make clear that he has a strategic view of American power that is different from the Obama administration’s narrow and tactical approach. He must tell Americans that he won’t overlook terrorist threats, as the Obama administration did in Benghazi; that he won’t fight to oust a dictator in Libya and ignore the pleas of another revolution in Syria; that he won’t simply denounce Iran’s nuclear program while tacitly legitimizing the country’s theocratic regime and ignoring its opponents; and that he won’t hand out billions of dollars in aid and debt forgiveness to Egypt’s new leaders when the principles of religious and political freedom are being trampled in the streets of Cairo.

Clearly America cannot do everything. But we must always champion our founding beliefs and reject the moral, political and cultural relativism that has flourished under Mr. Obama.

Mr. Romney can make the case that when people fight for their freedom, they will find support — sometimes political, sometimes economic and sometimes military — from the American president. When Russians and Chinese demand accountability from their governments, we can stand with them and work with their governments to further common interests. When terrorists target us, we will not simply eliminate them with drones while ignoring the environment that breeds them. And when our allies look to us for support, we will help them fight for themselves.

Criticisms of Mr. Obama’s national security policies have degenerated into a set of clichés about apologies, Israel, Iran and military spending. To be sure, there is more than a germ of truth in many of these accusations. But these are complaints, not alternatives. Worse yet, they betray the same robotic antipathy that animated Bush-haters. “I will not apologize for America” is no more a clarion call than “let’s nation-build at home.”

Mr. Romney must put flesh on the bones of his calls for a renewed American greatness. With a vision for American power, strategically and judiciously applied, we can continue to do great things with fewer resources. The nation’s greatest strength is not its military power or fantastic productivity. It’s the American commitment to our founding principles of political and economic freedom. If Mr. Romney can outline to voters how he will use American power to advance those principles, he will go a long way in persuading them he deserves the job of commander in chief.

Danielle Pletka is the vice president for foreign and defense studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

The Caucus

For Both Campaigns, Time to Fine-Tune Their Messages

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

Published: October 7, 2012

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Presidential candidates win when they adapt. And that is exactly what Mitt Romney and President Obama are each trying to do.

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The debate last Wednesday, events in the Middle East and the better-than-expected jobs report on Friday are forcing the two campaigns to adjust to a new reality in the final month before Election Day. Neither can simply follow its playbook and expect to succeed.

Here is a look at how the dynamics have shifted, and how the candidates are expected to react in the week ahead:

UNEMPLOYMENT For more than a year, Mr. Romney’s most consistent economic argument was a simple one: unemployment had stubbornly remained above 8 percent for Mr. Obama’s entire presidency. That is a firing offense, Mr. Romney said again and again.

“We’ve had 43 straight months with unemployment above 8 percent,” Mr. Romney said in his closing statement at the debate on Wednesday.

Now, though, Mr. Romney will have to adjust his stump speech and his ads. The drop in unemployment to 7.8 percent robs him of the simple argument he has been making and will require a new line of attack.

Mr. Romney’s initial attempt to adjust his message was to question the statistic. Speaking at an event in Virginia on Friday, he said that people who “just drop out altogether” from the work force had artificially lowered the rate.

But that technical explanation is not a rallying cry. So Mr. Romney has seized on a slightly different jobs message that does not dwell so much on the current unemployment rate. The new approach will be on display in rallies this week.

“There were fewer new jobs created this month than last month,” Mr. Romney said in Abingdon, Va. “We don’t have to stay on the path we’ve been on. We can do better.”

DEBATE TACTICS For Mr. Obama, the new reality was created moments after the debate ended on Wednesday night. His lackluster performance slowed his momentum and raised questions about his strategy.

For Mr. Obama’s campaign, the question is how to adapt. Senior strategists on Thursday hinted strongly that Mr. Obama would be much more aggressive in his next debate — an approach he has already begun taking at rallies in the last several days.

Campaign advisers say Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will reinforce that shift in his debate with Representative Paul D. Ryan on Thursday. And the campaign’s allies have already begun calling Mr. Romney a serial liar — a message that will continue in ads this week.

A new video released by Mr. Obama’s campaign on Sunday is an example of the new strategy. Called “Cameras,” the video argues that Mr. Romney’s debate performance was a series of lies that distorted his record.

But the biggest challenge for Mr. Obama’s campaign may be how to respond if polls this week show that his campaign has lost the momentum it seemed to have at the end of September.

LIBYA AND THE MIDEAST Both campaigns have long argued that the economy is the biggest issue of the campaign. But the killing of the American ambassador to Libya, as well as the broader instability in the Middle East, has changed that dynamic a bit.

Mr. Romney appears ready to adjust his message by seizing on the Libya situation to question the president’s judgment and leadership. He plans to deliver a foreign policy speech on Monday at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Va.

He clearly hopes to put Mr. Obama on the defensive over the attacks on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. The question is whether he can turn that argument into a broader indictment of the president’s foreign policy.

For Mr. Obama, the overseas events also present the need to adapt. His campaign will need to find answers for the situation in Libya and the Middle East while more aggressively making the wider case for his leadership abroad.

• © 2012 The New York Times Company

Romney Presses Consensus While Hitting Obama Foreign Policy

With the presidential race entering its final month, President Barack Obama’s campaign is trying to paint Republican nominee Mitt Romney as inept on the global stage and dishonest about his tax plans, while the challenger is turning his attacks to the incumbent’s foreign policy.

The president is seeking to regain footing after a lackluster debate performance as Romney tries to build momentum and make up ground in a race where he trails in the states most likely to decide the election.

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Mitt Romney. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

3:31

Oct. 4 (Bloomberg) — U.S. President Barack Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney debate their tax plans, proposals to reduce the federal budget deficit, regulation of the financial industry and health-care policy. They met in Denver last night in the first of three presidential debates scheduled for this month. (Excerpts. Source: Bloomberg)

The campaign has entered a phase where the electoral map has narrowed to as few as eight states, with two debates remaining between Obama and Romney and the lone vice presidential debate between Joe Biden and Representative Paul Ryan set for Oct. 11. That reduces the margin for error in a contest that has been close for the last four months.

Romney today is in one of those states, Virginia — his fifth stop there in four weeks — to deliver a foreign affairs speech at 11:20 a.m. that will characterize Obama as a proponent of a policy that has allowed alliances to fray and tensions, particularly in the Middle East, to fester and threaten U.S. interests.

Global Leadership

“If America does not lead, others will — others who do not share our interests and our values — and the world will grow darker, for our friends and for us,” Romney plans to say at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, according to excerpts provided in advance by his campaign. “America’s security and the cause of freedom cannot afford four more years like the last four years.”

Romney’s effort to round out his national security credentials at the tail-end of a campaign that he has focused almost exclusively on the domestic economy and jobs comes as Obama’s camp charges that the former Massachusetts governor is obscuring his true positions on a range of issues, including health care and education.

This morning, the Obama campaign released a new advertisement portraying Romney as a bumbler on foreign policy, highlighting criticism he received for his conduct of a July trip to Europe and his haste to attack the administration after the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya in Benghazi on Sept. 11.

“If this is how he handles the world now, just think of what Mitt Romney might do as president,” the ad says.

Swagger, Slogans

In a memorandum circulated by Obama’s campaign with the new ad, foreign policy aides said Romney has criticized the president with “swagger and slogans,” without offering specifics about how he would handle ending the war in Afghanistan, dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions, or confronting unrest in the Middle East and North Africa.

Romney, wrote Michele Flournoy and Colin Kahl, has “raised more questions than answers about what he’d actually do as president.”

On tax cuts, too, the president’s re-election team is charging that Romney is trying to redefine his position late in the race — and resorted to math in a bid to press their case.

Campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki showed reporters traveling with Obama a handwritten note-card with scribbled numbers breaking down tax-cut calculations she said illustrated Romney would either have to raise taxes or swell the federal budget deficit by at least $1 trillion to finance his plan.

Debate Performance

At the same time, Obama was working to recover from the presidential debate, poking fun at himself last night and signaling he would do better.

At a Los Angeles fundraising concert with 6,000 guests, Obama thanked Jon Bon Jovi, Katy Perry and others who “perform flawlessly night after night,” adding: “I can’t always say the same.”

Still, “The debate didn’t change the fundamentals of the electoral map, which is that it’s very difficult for Romney to get to 270” electoral votes needed to win, said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic strategist and deputy campaign manager for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid. Obama, he said, remains stronger in big swing states like Ohio and with voting blocs such as Hispanics.

Can’t Turn Back

Obama is raising money and trying to energize Latino voters in California before traveling to Ohio tomorrow. Today, he’ll announce the establishment of a national monument to César Chávez, founder of the United Farm Workers.

The campaign said on Oct. 6 that the president and allied Democratic Party committees raised $181 million in September, the largest monthly total in his re-election effort. He was also buoyed by a report that the nation’s jobless rate was 7.8 percent in September, the lowest since Obama took office.

At the Los Angeles fundraising concert, Obama told supporters that manufacturing and home values are coming back and that “we’ve come too far to turn back now.” He said Romney’s policies represent “a relapse” to the era of President George W. Bush.

Romney, for his part, continued his tack to a more centrist message designed to appeal to independent voters and those who haven’t yet decided on their presidential candidate.

At a rally in Port St. Lucie, Florida, yesterday, he told voters he would “do everything in my power” to “have us pull together, to reach across the aisle to find good Democrats in the House and the Senate that care deeply about America just as I do.”

Work Together

“I know they’re there. I know they’ll work together if they have leadership that will actually work and share credit and find ways to solve the great challenges,” Romney told about 12,000 people gathered outdoors to hear him.

Romney’s advisers said his speech today would lay out a bipartisan foreign-policy approach in the tradition of Presidents Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton during his second term.

Noting that his address would be at the alma mater of the late former Secretary of State George C. Marshall, Romney’s foreign policy adviser Alex Wong said: “Mitt Romney wants to renew that bipartisan vision” Marshall embodied.

Richard Williamson, who advised Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush and is a top Romney campaign foreign policy hand, said the Republican nominee would touch on Iraq, Iran, Libya and other challenges from abroad.

Broader Perspective

He said Romney would “put it in a broader perspective of the bipartisan approach to foreign policy and defense, from Harry Truman through Ronald Reagan and beyond, of peace through strength — America benefits and the world benefits when America provides bold leadership.”

Yet the speech will also promote a hawkish U.S. stance more often associated with George W. Bush, including a call for a more aggressive approach than Obama has taken to developments overseas and a larger defense budget to deter potential adversaries.

Romney plans to build on his call for a tougher line on Iran, including the imposition of stiffer sanctions than the president has imposed and the restoration of permanently stationed aircraft carrier task forces in the region.

“For the sake of peace, we must make clear to Iran through actions — not just words — that their nuclear pursuit will not be tolerated,” Romney is to say in his speech.

Delicate Line

Obama’s campaign argues that Romney’s positions are outside the “mainstream” of foreign policy thinking. The “latest effort to reboot and reset the Romney foreign policy doesn’t change the fact that he’s repeatedly taken positions outside of the mainstream, and often to the right of even George W. Bush,” Flournoy and Kahl wrote in their memo.

Romney is walking a delicate political line with the address as he reaches out to swing voters, some of whom might be put off by memories of the younger Bush’s foreign policy and the war in Iraq that shaped his presidency.

Romney’s statements to date “have been more in the hawkish or neoconservative point of view, and the question I think in this speech is whether, like he did in the debate, he’s able to tack back to a more centrist, statesman, Republican- establishment stance,” said Republican strategist John Ullyot, a former spokesman for the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“He needs to criticize the administration, on the one hand, politically, but that pushes him in a direction where he’s more hawkish, and there’s a definite bitter aftertaste with most moderates with that approach.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Julie Hirschfeld Davis in Lexington, Virginia at  1890 or Jdavis159@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jeanne Cummings at jcummings21@bloomberg.net.