It’s still many months until the Iowa caucuses and the Super Tuesday primaries, so presidential polls are pretty meaningless. Because the economy will obviously dominate the campaign, now is the time to insist that candidates focus equally on the national security and foreign policy issues that are in the minds of every voter. President Obama recently borrowed the title of a 2006 Newt Gingrich book — “Winning the Future” — and made it a theme of a budget speech. But neither Gingrich nor Obama even tried to answer the predicate question: How can you win the future unless you first secure it?
There are, as we’ve illustrated elsewhere in this section, severe threats to our security and that of our allies with which the next president will ignore at our peril. Most of them — terrorism, the ballistic missile threat, cyberwar, and Iran’s nuclear weapons program — have not been dealt with decisively or effectively in the Bush-Obama years.
