The moment that took all of the air out of Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign was when, in a debate with President Barack Obama, he dug into a peripheral issue that he thought was safe: foreign policy.
Romney threw all of his weight at Obama over the relatively limited attack on a U.S. embassy that had resulted in the death of an American ambassador. It blew up in Romney’s face when he demanded that Obama call the attack an incident of terror, only to be fact-checked by moderator Candy Crowley. She remembered that Obama had in fact referred to the event as an “act of terror.”
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All of that is boring and so beside the point of what’s going on in the United States and yet Democrats are ready to repeat that same dumb mistake. Like Romney, Democrats running for the presidential nomination believe that talking about a safe topic — that is, a subject that won’t hurt them with the national media or that President Trump can’t grab them by the throat with — puts them on solid footing.
It doesn’t put them on solid footing, and it actually puts all of us to sleep. At the primary debate on Tuesday, all of the Democrats said the same thing that war-hungry Republicans in Congress have been saying — that Trump did the wrong thing in declaring a pull-out of Syria.
The Kurds, the Kurds, the Kurds! Even the Democrats who explicitly claimed to support a pull-out — Elizabeth Warren and Tulsi Gabbard — paid lip service to the idea that we had betrayed the Kurds!
But who are the Kurds? Is there a single Democratic voter sitting at home watching this and thinking to himself, “Thank God we got to the real subject close to my heart — the safety of the Kurds, our brethren 6,000 miles away”?
And what about independent voters?
I know the media care about this but, as with Libya, that’s not going to decide the election.
