Okay, Politico–If Romney Is Kerry, Obama Is Carter

On the day that radical protestors storm the U.S. embassy in Egypt, the White House turns down a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and President Barack Obama violates his campaign pledge not to campaign on 9/11 by dissing Mitt Romney on a Miami radio show hosted by the “Pimp With a Limp,” Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei claim that Romney is becoming a John Kerry-like loser on foreign policy. If Romney is Kerry, then Obama is Carter–flailing helplessly as Iran advances and radicals attack American interests with abandon.

In fact, Obama has gone further, sending a craven message of support for the Arab Spring movement as the children of that revolution set our Libyan consulate ablaze. Obama’s video for the Arab Forum embraces Qatar’s autocratic ruler in an abject, humiliating manner without noting that Qatar itself is not a democracy. Meanwhile, Obama’s Twitter account–and his campaign email blasts–have focused on rallying support from voters rather than rallying Americans to remember the fallen of 9/11 and the heroes of the conflicts that followed.

The only detail that distinguishes Obama from Carter is the same reason Obama is ahead of Romney–namely, that while Carter’s mission to free the Iranian hostages ended in failure in the desert, Osama bin Laden was successfully found and killed on Obama’s watch (albeit with help from detainees and interrogations made possible by the Iraq War and by other Bush administration policies vehemently opposed by then-Sen. Obama). Allen and VandeHei push the Obama talking point that because Mitt Romney used the word “military” twice, without using the related word “troops” once, his ability to be commander-in-chief is in doubt. Nonsense.

Does anyone still remember when candidate Obama canceled a visit to wounded soldiers in Germany in 2008, but made time to go to the gym instead? Did that make him ineligible to be commander-in-chief? It certainly seems worse than using the word “military” instead of “troops.” Clearly there is a different standard for Obama, whose purported love for the troops is largely unreciprocated–a fact the media almost never reports–perhaps because our soldiers prefer to know that they are sacrificing for victory, not for Obama’s political benefit.

What made Kerry weak on foreign policy was his inconsistency–a quality shared by Obama, who railed against the abuse of Congress’s war powers, then launched a war in Libya without congressional approval; who said he would close the prison at Guantánamo Bay and then relented; who railed against invasions of privacy in the name of preventing terror, and then expanded government’s surveillance powers. But it’s Romney, not Obama, whom the Politico calls the new Kerry. Fine, then–but only if Obama is the new, marginally improved, Carter.