I do not think that it is something that directly increases Obama’s chances for election. Bush The Smarter won Gulf War I and it did not help him when it looked like he didn’t care about the economy. Similarly Obama is not connecting on the economy.
But Obama was called weak on foreign policy during the last election and people like Cheney and McCain said he could not conduct the war as effectively as they could. I think the end of Osama neutralizes that issue. As weak as I think Obama is when dealing with the opposition, I can’t make that argument when it comes to killing enemies.
Did you truly not notice we drifted off the topic into the economy? It was 1886 I think and the significance was that it was the Supreme Court that made the ruling. It was not the house and senate. It was not a vote of the people.
Note .it was conceded that Obama would get a boost from assassinating Osama. However would it offset the economy?
Yep, all discussed.
How does killing OBL make Obama strong on foreign policy? Do you imagine some other hypothetical CIC who would not have ordered the attack? Bush Sr and Jr would have done it, Clinton would have done it, Reagan would have done it, McCain would have done it, Romney would have done it…ad infinitum. The only one I can think of who would probably hesitate would have been Carter even though I think in the end he would still decide to attack. And even if it could be argued that Carter would be weaker here, I’m not sure that the “I’m stronger than Carter on foreign policy” line is a winning campaign slogan.
It’s all about perception. Typical Republican attack lines about Obama being “weak” on terror or foreign policy would sound out of touch and ridiculous. If Kerry had such a huge foreign policy win that was easy to sum up in a few words, he would have wiped the floor with Bush in 2004.
The attack was at the end of a long string of events, caused by the determination to reach the result it did. I don’t have to imagine a hypothetical CIC who wouldn’t follow through; I know of a *real *one and so do you. The one who disbanded the CIA unit looking for OBL back in 2006. The one who admitted he stopped caring back in 2002, after fucking up at Tora Bora. Remember that guy?
Well during the debates this exact circumstance was offered as a hypothetical and his answer was no he would not. People thought that Obama was just posturing; he wasn’t. The man is no poseur.
Assuming any President would have made finding him as high of a resource priority - A President might ask the Pakistanis to get him … and be told he wasn’t there when they went. He might order a drone attack - and have no way to know for sure he was gotten, and cause collateral damage in a suburb populated by retired military men. He might inform the Pakistani security forces of the attack first, to find that the target is now no longer there. There were lots of other less risky but poorer choices to make. He choose the better albeit higher stakes one. Sometimes all in in the right bet to make. I’m not sure how many Presidents actually would have done this this way.
Very well thought out and logical. Which is why it won’t make a bit of difference to the bulk of swing voters. “Obama killed bin Laden! He’s tough! We’re tough! Woo-hoo! USA! USA!” is the mindset you are competing with. Good luck!
To paraphrase “the Social Network” if Bush could have gotten rid of Osama Bin Laden he would have gotten rid of Osama Bin Laden. Instead he took his eye off the ball and attacked Iraq. Obama re-prioritized Afghanistan and the hunt for OBL and got it done.
The biggest problem has been dealing with Pakistan, and McCain had a different view than Obama did when asked about it. Maybe McCain was lying, we’ll never know because we elected the guy who said he would go into Pakistan unilaterally if needed, and then he did.
After the 9/11 attacks, there were some conservatives who tried to use it to partisan advantage. Claiming that if Gore had been elected, he would have tried to negotiate with Al Qaeda.
It’s nonsense of course. The two most liberal presidents were Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson - and we saw what they did when America was attacked (or in Johnson’s case when it looked like a possible attack).
But having played “one party is clearly superior to the other” for decades, it’s difficult for the Republicans to suddenly switch to “we’re all fundamentally the same” at this point. They set up the rules of the game and now they’ve got to take the lumps when the other team beat them at it.
This was Obama’s operation The Repubs had nothing to do with it. If it failed, the Repubs would have creamed him. They would certainly made no claim of being partly to blame because their ancient intelligence fingered the courier. It is BS.
There was a huge political risk in this operation. Obama had the guts to give the go ahead. The Repubs had no risk at all.
Obama gets the credit, if you believe it was a good operation. It will help his reelection chances. There are a few who believe assassinations are wrong and will be against Obama for the operation. The REpubs will get none of that backlash.
I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that the Republican party is now effectively running on a platform for which it has not really groomed candidates. The ones that can lay claim to that platform are all unknown or whackos (most of them are both).
The Republican party has to credibly retool itself to conform to the tea party without alienating anyone that isn’t deep deep red.
Of course and an economic boom will do the opposite.
You mean these are things he could have done with the congress he had in place at any moment in time?
Institute tax incentives for corporations that ACTUALLY HIRE PEOPLE. That is, reward corporations for HIRING, don’t give them tax breaks for “business expansion” or anything like that. Give larger breaks to corporations that provide decent paying jobs rather than McJobs.
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And how the hell do you do that? Subsidize wages? Well, then wtf is the difference between doing that and simply reducing the payroll taxes.
This is a great idea if we could maintain a filibuster proof majority in the senate for more than a couple of months. Taking all that labor off the market by tying them up in public works project is a great way to create wage inflation.
Unjustifiable tariffs lead to trade wars and while w e would suffer less than most, we would all suffer. Noone tolerates blatant “beggar they neighbor” policies.
Unless we give government patents much much much longer durations, its not going to work. The problem is that the government largely does the long term payoff stuff that can’t be monetized within patent protection period. So unless we create different categories of patents for this sort of research, we simply can’t control it by the time it becomes commercial.
I don’t think politics played into it at all. If he wanted to be political about it. He could have ordered the operation last year before the elections.
