By: Garry South
June 2, 2008 02:50 PM EST
Now that it’s obvious Barack Obama will be the Democratic candidate for president, GOP nominee apparent John McCain and the Republican attack machine predictably have started in on the Illinois senator as a callow youth with scant foreign policy experience and a resultant naive view of the world.
Hillary Rodham Clinton herself took that same tack (remember the 3 a.m. phone call ad?), and it clearly didn’t work. So if I were a Republican, I’d be a mite careful about such a line of attack. Clearly, the GOP’s aim is to contrast McCain’s extensive military service and 26 years in Congress and the Senate with Obama’s fewer than four years as a member of the world’s most exclusive club.
But the danger is that the criticisms might just provoke an unwelcome retrospective on the inexplicably scrawny foreign policy credentials and international exposure of the past two cycles’ GOP nominee, the man whom the Gallup Poll says 60 percent of Republicans still think is doing a bang-up job: George W. Bush.
Yes, the same Bush who has a record-high 71 percent disapproval rating among Americans; who is viewed by citizens of our closest ally, Great Britain, as being a bigger threat to world peace than the leaders of Iran and North Korea; whose ratings in putatively friendly Saudi Arabia are lower than those of Osama bin Laden; and whose foreign policy blunders and reckless unilateralism have driven American credibility and prestige around the world to all-time lows (a 15 percent U.S. approval rating in Pakistan and a 9 percent rating in Turkey, according to the Pew Research Center).
Unlike many of my fellow Democrats, I don’t think Bush is a complete moron. (I know, I know, damning with faint praise.) A favorite bumper sticker on Democrat-owned Volvos and Toyota Priuses reads, “Somewhere in Texas, a village is missing its idiot.” Actually, I believe Bush is serviceably bright, rather clever in some ways, and a better overall politician than his father was.
What I also believe, however, is that Bush has clearly and incontrovertibly demonstrated a lifelong intellectual laziness and lack of curiosity, especially about the larger world. Public television features a series about H.A. and Margret Rey’s superinquisitive monkey named Curious George, but it’s not likely there will ever be a similar show about George W. Bush. He has been the least qualified and most inexperienced president in terms of foreign affairs in the lifetime of most Americans today — largely because of Bush’s self-imposed blissful ignorance of the world. This, as we all now know, has cost the U.S. dearly.
Think this is just harsh Democratic spin? In his newly minted book about life in W’s White House, Bush’s fellow Texan, longtime aide and former White House press secretary Scott McClellan criticizes Bush’s “lack of inquisitiveness.” In my book, that’s a euphemism for self-imposed blissful ignorance.
Consider the undeniable facts. Bush ran for president in 2000 as a 54-year-old man with Yale and Harvard degrees, the scion of a wealthy, well-known and well-connected family. His granddaddy had been an internationalist U.S senator from Connecticut; his daddy, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., American representative in China and CIA director — all before serving eight years as a globe-trotting vice president and four as a one-term president with an extensive foreign Rolodex.
Yet George the younger, even while gearing up to run for commander in chief, displayed a shocking lack of interest in foreign travel. Just last year, Gordon Johndroe, press spokesman for Bush’s National Security Council, was asked to provide a list of countries Bush visited prior to being sworn in as president in 2001. Johndroe could come up with only seven: China, Japan, Mexico (which, of course, borders Bush’s adopted state of Texas), Spain, Britain, Ireland and Israel.
The trip to China was in 1975, when Bush was nearly 30, to visit his dad when the elder Bush was posted in Beijing. There is also, mysteriously, one long-rumored but never-explained jaunt to Guatemala in Bush’s youth. Reportedly, Bush also traveled to Gambia in 1990, representing his president father at that nation’s Independence Day celebration.
In 1998, after his reelection as governor of Texas and while considering a run for president, Bush also went to Italy to visit his daughter briefly before heading to the Middle East (that’s when the Israel trip came in), where, among other activities, he spent exactly two hours in Egypt having dinner with President Hosni Mubarak. In Bush’s diary from that trip, posted by his Texas gubernatorial press office, he said the reason for the tour was to “enjoy myself, to get out of Texas, have a chance to relax.” When it was over, he wrote, “I’m really glad to be home. There’s nothing like sleeping in your own sack!”
Bush’s curious lack of significant foreign travel was also reflected in his general ignorance about the world’s state of affairs. There was the celebrated instance in 1999, when presidential candidate Bush was asked by a political reporter from WHDH-TV in Boston to name the leaders of four countries much in the news, including nuclear-armed antagonists India and Pakistan. Bush not only failed to come up with the names of their leaders but also completely muffed an attempt to describe the then-leader of Pakistan: “The new Pakistani general, he’s just been elected — not elected; this guy took over office. It appears this guy is going to bring stability to the country, and I think it’s good news for the subcontinent,” Bush averred.
“This guy,” of course, was none other than Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who had earlier launched a military action against India without informing his own civilian government, then staged a coup d’état in ’99 to gain control of Pakistan. He proceeded to have the elected prime minister arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment on “hijacking” charges for attempting to divert the plane on which Musharraf was coming back into the country to stage the coup. All that was good international news to Bush?
Bush also displayed a shocking — not to mention embarrassing — lack of familiarity with the rest of the world during his 2000 presidential run. He confused the newly free Eastern European nations of Slovenia and Slovakia, infamously referred to Greeks as “Grecians” and called citizens of Kosovo “Kosovarians” instead of Kosovars. And the geographical putziness didn’t stop once he became president. In Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2001, he referred to the continent of Africa as a “nation.” In Romania recently, he even bollixed up NATO as “MATO.”
Amazingly, Bush’s first-ever trip to both France and Germany was in 2002, as a 56-year-old sitting president of the United States. It’s no wonder that one cartoon prior to Bush’s attendance at his first Group of Eight summit showed the other G-8 leaders standing in a receiving line awaiting Bush’s arrival, with one whispering to another, “Let’s have some fun with George and switch our name tags!”
Then, of course, there are also the instances of Bush’s tone-deaf and downright gauche behavior on the international stage, which has raised eyebrows and tempers around the world. Returning to the White House right after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he pledged to launch a “crusade” to find the perpetrators — apparently clueless as to how this historically loaded word would play in the Arab and Muslim worlds.
At the G-8 confab in 2006, he sneaked up behind the obviously startled and irritated German Chancellor Angela Merkel and began massaging her shoulders and neck — an unwanted act that would have constituted sexual harassment in a typical American office environment. This earned Bush the sobriquet “groper in chief” on websites around the world. At this same summit, Bush let loose with the word “s---” in front of an open mike while talking to British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Just last month, Bush violated the long-held protocol against U.S. presidents’ launching attacks on domestic political rivals overseas: He made a not-so-veiled, and also loaded, reference in a speech to the Israeli Knesset to Obama’s pledge to talk to our enemies, calling it “appeasement.”
In contrast to Bush’s obvious longtime disinterest in global travel, Obama looks like a veritable Gulliver. Born in Hawaii to an American mother and a Kenyan father, he lived in Indonesia for four years with his Indonesian stepfather, attended both Catholic and Muslim schools there, went to college in California and New York, traveled to and around both Pakistan (with a side trip to India) and Africa while still in his 20s, and had a Pakistani roommate when he lived in New York. He returned to Africa in 1992 after graduating from Harvard Law School — at the same time that Bush was still functioning as the glad-handing frontman for the Texas Rangers.
Obama’s multiracial, multicultural family looks like a little U.N., including a half-Indonesian half-sister (by his mother), six other living half-siblings by his African father (two of whom also had an American mother), a Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law and a half-Chinese niece. His African step-grandmother still lives in a Kenyan village, as do many other relatives. His wife, Michelle, and her family are African-American.
But hell, forget Obama. His mother, for God’s sake, had more international experience than Bush did when he was elected president. An anthropologist with a Ph.D., she studied Russian in college in Hawaii, lived for years in both Indonesia and Pakistan, spoke fluent Indonesian and worked for both the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Ford Foundation on micro-credit programs for women and the poor.
Even though Clinton’s attacks against Obama as being inexperienced and lacking foreign policy heft fell flat, you can be sure McCain and the Republicans will continue on that same flight path. But I’d advise them to take another close look at the laughable pre-presidential foreign credentials of their own sitting — and internationally discredited — president before making that the staple of their campaign against Obama.
Garry South is a longtime Democratic strategist and commentator who lives in Santa Monica, Calif. He is not involved in the Democratic presidential campaigns this year
From Politico.com
-VG
June 2, 2008 02:50 PM EST
Now that it’s obvious Barack Obama will be the Democratic candidate for president, GOP nominee apparent John McCain and the Republican attack machine predictably have started in on the Illinois senator as a callow youth with scant foreign policy experience and a resultant naive view of the world.
Hillary Rodham Clinton herself took that same tack (remember the 3 a.m. phone call ad?), and it clearly didn’t work. So if I were a Republican, I’d be a mite careful about such a line of attack. Clearly, the GOP’s aim is to contrast McCain’s extensive military service and 26 years in Congress and the Senate with Obama’s fewer than four years as a member of the world’s most exclusive club.
But the danger is that the criticisms might just provoke an unwelcome retrospective on the inexplicably scrawny foreign policy credentials and international exposure of the past two cycles’ GOP nominee, the man whom the Gallup Poll says 60 percent of Republicans still think is doing a bang-up job: George W. Bush.
Yes, the same Bush who has a record-high 71 percent disapproval rating among Americans; who is viewed by citizens of our closest ally, Great Britain, as being a bigger threat to world peace than the leaders of Iran and North Korea; whose ratings in putatively friendly Saudi Arabia are lower than those of Osama bin Laden; and whose foreign policy blunders and reckless unilateralism have driven American credibility and prestige around the world to all-time lows (a 15 percent U.S. approval rating in Pakistan and a 9 percent rating in Turkey, according to the Pew Research Center).
Unlike many of my fellow Democrats, I don’t think Bush is a complete moron. (I know, I know, damning with faint praise.) A favorite bumper sticker on Democrat-owned Volvos and Toyota Priuses reads, “Somewhere in Texas, a village is missing its idiot.” Actually, I believe Bush is serviceably bright, rather clever in some ways, and a better overall politician than his father was.
What I also believe, however, is that Bush has clearly and incontrovertibly demonstrated a lifelong intellectual laziness and lack of curiosity, especially about the larger world. Public television features a series about H.A. and Margret Rey’s superinquisitive monkey named Curious George, but it’s not likely there will ever be a similar show about George W. Bush. He has been the least qualified and most inexperienced president in terms of foreign affairs in the lifetime of most Americans today — largely because of Bush’s self-imposed blissful ignorance of the world. This, as we all now know, has cost the U.S. dearly.
Think this is just harsh Democratic spin? In his newly minted book about life in W’s White House, Bush’s fellow Texan, longtime aide and former White House press secretary Scott McClellan criticizes Bush’s “lack of inquisitiveness.” In my book, that’s a euphemism for self-imposed blissful ignorance.
Consider the undeniable facts. Bush ran for president in 2000 as a 54-year-old man with Yale and Harvard degrees, the scion of a wealthy, well-known and well-connected family. His granddaddy had been an internationalist U.S senator from Connecticut; his daddy, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., American representative in China and CIA director — all before serving eight years as a globe-trotting vice president and four as a one-term president with an extensive foreign Rolodex.
Yet George the younger, even while gearing up to run for commander in chief, displayed a shocking lack of interest in foreign travel. Just last year, Gordon Johndroe, press spokesman for Bush’s National Security Council, was asked to provide a list of countries Bush visited prior to being sworn in as president in 2001. Johndroe could come up with only seven: China, Japan, Mexico (which, of course, borders Bush’s adopted state of Texas), Spain, Britain, Ireland and Israel.
The trip to China was in 1975, when Bush was nearly 30, to visit his dad when the elder Bush was posted in Beijing. There is also, mysteriously, one long-rumored but never-explained jaunt to Guatemala in Bush’s youth. Reportedly, Bush also traveled to Gambia in 1990, representing his president father at that nation’s Independence Day celebration.
In 1998, after his reelection as governor of Texas and while considering a run for president, Bush also went to Italy to visit his daughter briefly before heading to the Middle East (that’s when the Israel trip came in), where, among other activities, he spent exactly two hours in Egypt having dinner with President Hosni Mubarak. In Bush’s diary from that trip, posted by his Texas gubernatorial press office, he said the reason for the tour was to “enjoy myself, to get out of Texas, have a chance to relax.” When it was over, he wrote, “I’m really glad to be home. There’s nothing like sleeping in your own sack!”
Bush’s curious lack of significant foreign travel was also reflected in his general ignorance about the world’s state of affairs. There was the celebrated instance in 1999, when presidential candidate Bush was asked by a political reporter from WHDH-TV in Boston to name the leaders of four countries much in the news, including nuclear-armed antagonists India and Pakistan. Bush not only failed to come up with the names of their leaders but also completely muffed an attempt to describe the then-leader of Pakistan: “The new Pakistani general, he’s just been elected — not elected; this guy took over office. It appears this guy is going to bring stability to the country, and I think it’s good news for the subcontinent,” Bush averred.
“This guy,” of course, was none other than Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who had earlier launched a military action against India without informing his own civilian government, then staged a coup d’état in ’99 to gain control of Pakistan. He proceeded to have the elected prime minister arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment on “hijacking” charges for attempting to divert the plane on which Musharraf was coming back into the country to stage the coup. All that was good international news to Bush?
Bush also displayed a shocking — not to mention embarrassing — lack of familiarity with the rest of the world during his 2000 presidential run. He confused the newly free Eastern European nations of Slovenia and Slovakia, infamously referred to Greeks as “Grecians” and called citizens of Kosovo “Kosovarians” instead of Kosovars. And the geographical putziness didn’t stop once he became president. In Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2001, he referred to the continent of Africa as a “nation.” In Romania recently, he even bollixed up NATO as “MATO.”
Amazingly, Bush’s first-ever trip to both France and Germany was in 2002, as a 56-year-old sitting president of the United States. It’s no wonder that one cartoon prior to Bush’s attendance at his first Group of Eight summit showed the other G-8 leaders standing in a receiving line awaiting Bush’s arrival, with one whispering to another, “Let’s have some fun with George and switch our name tags!”
Then, of course, there are also the instances of Bush’s tone-deaf and downright gauche behavior on the international stage, which has raised eyebrows and tempers around the world. Returning to the White House right after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he pledged to launch a “crusade” to find the perpetrators — apparently clueless as to how this historically loaded word would play in the Arab and Muslim worlds.
At the G-8 confab in 2006, he sneaked up behind the obviously startled and irritated German Chancellor Angela Merkel and began massaging her shoulders and neck — an unwanted act that would have constituted sexual harassment in a typical American office environment. This earned Bush the sobriquet “groper in chief” on websites around the world. At this same summit, Bush let loose with the word “s---” in front of an open mike while talking to British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Just last month, Bush violated the long-held protocol against U.S. presidents’ launching attacks on domestic political rivals overseas: He made a not-so-veiled, and also loaded, reference in a speech to the Israeli Knesset to Obama’s pledge to talk to our enemies, calling it “appeasement.”
In contrast to Bush’s obvious longtime disinterest in global travel, Obama looks like a veritable Gulliver. Born in Hawaii to an American mother and a Kenyan father, he lived in Indonesia for four years with his Indonesian stepfather, attended both Catholic and Muslim schools there, went to college in California and New York, traveled to and around both Pakistan (with a side trip to India) and Africa while still in his 20s, and had a Pakistani roommate when he lived in New York. He returned to Africa in 1992 after graduating from Harvard Law School — at the same time that Bush was still functioning as the glad-handing frontman for the Texas Rangers.
Obama’s multiracial, multicultural family looks like a little U.N., including a half-Indonesian half-sister (by his mother), six other living half-siblings by his African father (two of whom also had an American mother), a Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law and a half-Chinese niece. His African step-grandmother still lives in a Kenyan village, as do many other relatives. His wife, Michelle, and her family are African-American.
But hell, forget Obama. His mother, for God’s sake, had more international experience than Bush did when he was elected president. An anthropologist with a Ph.D., she studied Russian in college in Hawaii, lived for years in both Indonesia and Pakistan, spoke fluent Indonesian and worked for both the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Ford Foundation on micro-credit programs for women and the poor.
Even though Clinton’s attacks against Obama as being inexperienced and lacking foreign policy heft fell flat, you can be sure McCain and the Republicans will continue on that same flight path. But I’d advise them to take another close look at the laughable pre-presidential foreign credentials of their own sitting — and internationally discredited — president before making that the staple of their campaign against Obama.
Garry South is a longtime Democratic strategist and commentator who lives in Santa Monica, Calif. He is not involved in the Democratic presidential campaigns this year
From Politico.com
-VG
