Even if they had stopped it, Al Qaeda would have just hit us again later, because foiled attacks don’t invoke retaliation. But it’s unlikely they would have. An engaged President can’t find out things if his agencies can’t even share intelligence.
The last time a Democratic President committed ground troops was LBJ. Since then, it’s been airpower only, with ground troops only put at risk for “peacekeeping”. Obama has resolutely ruled out ground troops to fight ISIS, although he has been putting them in piecemeal on the downlow, whlie insisting they aren’t actually ground troops. The point is that the Democratic base demands no wars, but will accept wars that aren’t quite wars because few or no body bags come home. That limits Democratic Presidents’ options and would have limited Gore’s response to 9/11.
We’re not interested for the purpose of this line of discussion on whether there’s some objective measure of a President being “good”. What matters for the purposes of predicting election is how the public perceives the President. And the public wants more from Obama on ISIS than we’ve been seeing. The public trusts freakin’ Donald Trump more on fighting terrorism than Hillary Clinton:
And that’s worse than it looks since Trump is the worst Republican ever and Clinton has a stronger reputation than most Democrats on national security issues. Put a more normal Republican up against a more normal Democrat in a time when national security is a top issue and the Republican wins. As a matter of fact, there hasn’t been a single race since Vietnam that a Democrat has won when national security has been a top campaign issue, with possibly the exception of 2008 thanks to GWB screwing it all up. But now Democrats are in charge and doing less than the public demands, entrenching the public view that Democrats are weak on national security.
Sorry, should have said more than three straight terms. Clinton will have an uphill battle winning a fourth term for her party, although given her past performance once in office she may do fine. Plus she might draw Ted Cruz, which would be another big help to her.
But this idea that Republicans won’t win for a generation is nonsense. Things are always changing. Europe is moving to the right. I don’t think we’re going to keep on being more left than them, especially since Democrats seem determined to not heed the warning signs just as the european left didn’t.
Yes, I agree “for a generation” is more than can be confidently predicted. Unexpected events can intervene, and the Democrats are proven masters at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The GOP is in a grand reshuffle of what they are all about that started at the end of the GWB years and is still not over, but that does not completely cripple them.
Hmmm… You saying he’s doing it more the pre-Tonkin-Gulf way (“advisors”)?
There would’ve had to have been a series of highly-restrictive regulations in order to curtail the greed of Wall Street, banks, and individual mortgage brokers and borrowers. There’s no chance Gore or Congress would’ve had the political will to pull that off in the face of then-recent deregulation. The housing bubble was bound to burst regardless.
