Obama 2012, Bin Laden, and Willard's 3 A.M. Phone Call

Is anyone taking seriously the complaints now coming about how the president's re-election campaign is using the decision to kill Osama bin Laden to its own advantage? I think the killing of the author of the 9/11 atrocities, and a considerable international murderer even beyond that particular crime, is something that a president who wants to be president again is within his rights to use. However, Willard Romney is all a'flutter. ("My dear young chap, that simply is not done.") There apparently were no clouds in the sky at which John McCain could yell, so he weighed in on the dreadful inappropriateness of it all. And Arianna Huffington picked this issue to go back to being insufferable again:

I don't think there should be an ad about that.... [T]o turn it into a campaign ad is one of the most despicable things you can do. It's the same thing that Hillary Clinton did with the 3 a.m. call. You know, you are not ready to be commander-in-chief.

For what it's worth, I didn't think what Hillary Clinton did was out of bounds, either. But there is no serious comparison to be made here. When the Clinton campaign made their ad, they did so on behalf of a candidate who had no more experience taking that 3 a.m. phone call than Barack Obama did. In the present case, the president actually gave the order. Osama bin Laden is actually dead. And, having done what he did, the president is well within his rights to wonder out loud if Willard Romney would have made the same call, given what Romney said back in 2007, when he was just starting to run for president. And it's no more or less "fair" on the merits than is Romney's constant refrain that the president "doesn't understand how the economy works" because he's never been a vulture capitalist.

(Today in New Hampshire, while travelling around with Senator Kelly Ayotte, his latest vice-presidential beard, and demonstrating the pure class and raw political courage that has marked his entire political career by throwing a cheap shot at someone who wasn't in the room, Romney said that, "Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order." This from a man whose toughest decision in his life has been which house to sleep in.)

The reason for all the dust that's being thrown up is that, every time he talks about foreign policy, Romney is a blindfolded man in a yard full of rakes. He wrote a Washington Post op-ed about arms control that proved Romney didn't know enough about the subject to feed to his fish. He flirted with advocating a trade war with China, and he and his advisors occasionally slip and call Russia "the Soviet Union." Of course, he did make the bobsleds run on time, so there's that.

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