I think it’s only polite when the country has a huge success to kind of back off the criticism and nitpicking for at least a day. I don’t mean necessarily that ordinary folks should feel restrained in any way, but politicians do themselves no favors when they react with “yes, but” downers. That’s what Howard Dean did the day we captured Saddam Hussein. His polls went into an immediate decline and he ultimately lost his considerable lead in Iowa. I always thought the two were closely related. What Dean said was true, and it needed to be said. It just didn’t need to be said that day. Rick Santorum doesn’t have any kind of lead to blow, and he’s probably not going to ever be competitive in his run for the presidency, but he still comes off as a jerk.
“Congratulations, well done, well orchestrated,” Santorum told the Des Moines Register before an event with voters. “That’s one isolated area as opposed to the president’s foreign policy and how it’s affecting our security. The president’s foreign policy with respect to our security is to make our allies less confident in us and has resulted in them in distancing themselves from us.”
…
“I don’t believe that this particular event of killing Osama bin Laden is going to change our enemies’ feelings about this because the president has been very clear that he always wanted to get bin Laden but he’s also been very clear about dealing with our enemies, his policy is to engage them not confront them,” Santorum said. “So I don’t see anything in this that would give any enemy of the United States any concerns beyond that one event.”
Personally, I’ve had enough confrontation, so to the small extent that I’m willing to grant Santorum his point, I am actually glad that the president is more interested in engagement. But, even if I agreed entirely with Santorum, I’d still think he’s politically tone-deaf, just like I did with Howard Dean.
Going forward, I don’t expect Republicans to drop their critiques of Obama’s foreign policy or offer unqualified praise of the operation that killed Usama bin-Laden. I do, however, think many of those criticisms will have less resonance or sense of plausibility to them as a result of this success. I am hoping that the public with gradually get the sense that Obama is fixing and solving problems that the Republicans either created or failed to address. As always, I intend to point out how these things would be fixed or solved with better solutions and more quickly if the Republicans had less power to obstruct.
And there’s climate change. That one is not getting fixed anytime soon, by any conceivable politician. And it may be the most serious of all our problems.
