Democratic strategists say they’re not too worried about Republican attempts to turn the Brussels bombing into an election liability for Democrats, and say President Obama has shown that the party will be able to survive the expected GOP effort.
After news broke of the two explosions that killed more than 30 people in Brussels, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz both said the attack shows the lack of U.S. leadership is allowing the Islamic State to spread across the globe.
“We need a commander in chief that defends America, and defending America means defeating radical Islamic terrorism and defeating ISIS,” Cruz charged. “What is completely unreasonable is Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s consistent pattern of refusing even to say the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism.'”
But Democratic strategists said the GOP has tried to hammer Obama on this before, when the Paris attack happened in November. Then, Obama refused to agree to strengthen U.S. screening procedures for refugees, and Republicans pounced.
Today, however, strategists say the narrow issue of allowing Syrian refugees as well as the larger debate over Obama’s handling of terrorist threats don’t seem to be hurting Democrats on the campaign trail.
“They tried to exploit this after Paris and I didn’t see much traction,” said veteran Democratic strategist and former top Senate Democratic aide Jim Manley. “I’m not so sure anything is going to change now.”
In contrast, Manley said the visceral anti-immigrant rhetoric of Trump and Cruz might actually hurt Republicans come November.
“National security is always a great issue for Republicans but I’m beginning to wonder,” Manley said. “Between Trump and Cruz, they’ve made the debate so toxic that it might be a wash in terms of politics.”
Another Democratic strategist who didn’t want to be named said such talk could boost Republicans in the short term, but that they could be “putting themselves in a box on the more extreme policies,” such as advocating for deploying U.S. ground troops in Syria.
“Right now they’re disproving a negative, but when it gets to [the question of] ‘what exactly are you proposing,'” they could lose support, the strategist said.
That strategist said Obama’s poll numbers bear that out.
Polls taken shortly after the Paris and San Bernardino attacks, such as a Dec. 19 CNN survey, showed 60 percent of Americans disapproving of Obama’s handling of terrorism overall and 64 percent disapproving of his strategy to combat the Islamic State in particular. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll from Dec. 9 put Obama’s job approval rating at just 43 percent.
But as memories of those attacks faded and Islamic State barbarism was out of the headlines, Obama’s job approval rating shot back up. On Sunday Gallup put it at 50 percent and Rasmussen Reports clocked it at 52 percent.
In the meantime, Obama was showing no signs on Tuesday that he was willing to revisit U.S. rules for refugees even in the fact of the Brussels attack.
Obama was in Cuba when terrorists unleashed mayhem in Brussels, Belgium on Tuesday. His public remarks stuck to the script and he didn’t take questions, but given his defiance on the issue last year after the Paris attacks he is unlikely to budge.
Obama unequivocally refused to halt the program after members of the Islamic State killed 130 Parisians on Nov. 13. At least one of the attackers snuck into France by posing as a refugee.
“And when I hear folks say that, ‘well, maybe we should just admit the Christians but not the Muslims,’ when I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted, when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution, that’s shameful,” Obama said days later while he attended the G-20 summit in Turkey.
“That’s not American; it’s not who we are,” he said. “We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”
