[Edit: I’m an idiot and swapped the debates. The one tomorrow is actually the town hall, which will be about basically anything people ask questions about. The explicit foreign policy debate isn’t until next week. Still, my general points stand, so I’ll leave this up]
So the second debate is coming up, and this one is going to be about foreign policy. I predict more of the same from Romney, only more so. If you were frustrated last time by him asserting generalities and absolutely refusing to back those up with any detail, then you are going to be driven up the wall this time.
If you’re Team Obama, how do you prepare for this? Well, it’s actually pretty simple I think. Romney really doesn’t have any meaningful differences to highlight in terms of policy. Which just means he’s going to complain about RESULTS and try to completely ignore POLICY. That is: he’ll talk about how things are chaotic in Syria, how Iran is pushing for the bomb, how Afghanistan isn’t exactly peachy, how the power gap with China keeps getting smaller, etc. And then he’ll mouth extremely vague platitudes like the value of a ‘strong foreign policy’ and how he has a ‘commitment to American exceptionalism.’
In response, Obama needs to do two things, and do them over and over.
First, he needs to defend his accomplishments. Killed Bin Laden, wound down a terrible and wildly stupid war (and the less said about Afghanistan the better), prevented a genocide in Benghazi, foiled numerous attempted terrorist attacks on the US, Al Qaeda is a few radicals in caves these days. And so on. While I personally am more than a bit leery about some of those phrasings, I think they will work for him. Obama has more credibility on foreign policy than any Democratic candidate of my lifetime and ought to capitalize on it. He said he’d go into Pakistan if necessary, he did, and now Bin Laden is dead.
Romney will want to portray the violence in the Middle East as a problem. But Obama needs to come back over the top. Under my watch, dictators in the Middle East were toppled in the name of democracy. For all that there is trouble there, it’s the trouble that comes from people asserting the freedom and values that we all believe in. The previous administration instigated disastrous wars and provoked chaos. We have helped usher in more meaningful changes by giving the people in these countries the chance to assert their own freedom.
Second, he needs to press Romney repeatedly to clarify what he’d do differently. And he needs to do this by emphasizing the difference between himself and Bush. He needs to clearly and coherently identify these foreign policy issues as allowing for two basic responses: his, or the cowboy insanity of the Bush adminstration. And then put it to Romney: if you don’t like how I’m handling it, that must mean you want to put US soldiers in the middle of the conflict.
The beauty about this debate strategy is that it is almost perfectly resilient to anything Romney can say or do. If you construct your arguments correctly, Romney can weasel and dissemble all he wants – and it will appear as precisely that. Meanwhile Obama comes off as the adult in the room, the guy you can trust in a crisis.