Foreign policy hasn't been given that much of a run in presidential campaigning -- maybe that just another indicator of how bad we've gotten about it as a nation. Sometimes it seems as though half of America wishes there weren't such a thing as "foreign." It makes them uncomfortable and insecure. If we only ran the whole damn planet...
As the New York Times points out, the Bhutto assassination has provided the opportunity for a little foreign policy quiz. How did the candidates react? Well, here they are in countdown form -- worst first -- with implied editorial comments in italics:
Mike Huckabee, the leading Republican in polls of Iowa caucusgoers, found himself on the defensive on Friday, trying to clarify earlier remarks in which he said the chaos in Pakistan underscored the need to build a fence on the American border with Mexico, and that “any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into the country” should be monitored.
Mitt Romney said that, if he had been president, he would have gathered information from “our C.I.A. bureau chief in Islamabad.” The Central Intelligence Agency has station chiefs, not bureau chiefs. (That said, Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, invoked Mr. Reagan on Friday as a great foreign policy leader, and noted, “he was a governor, not a so-called foreign policy expert.”)
Most of the candidates talked Friday about the need for democracy in Pakistan, and no one has stressed that theme more frequently than President Bush himself. But as the complexity of the situation there has set in on the Bush administration in recent years, the talk of democracy has contrasted sharply with the need for stability (something Rudolph W. Giuliani talked about Friday).
Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, spent the day asserting their own personal expertise: their private conversations with Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Musharraf, their visits to Pakistan and their concerns about fallout affecting the nation’s nuclear arsenal to the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Mr. McCain, speaking in New Hampshire, also sought to convey leader-to-leader chemistry when he called Mr. Musharraf a “personally scrupulously honest” man who deserved “the benefit of the doubt” on uniting Pakistan.
Mr. Biden tried to sound presidential as he expressed concern about loose nuclear weapons in Pakistan, and he also emphasized his foresight by noting that he had long called Pakistan “the most dangerous nation on the planet.”
Mr. Richardson, a former diplomat, made an effort to cast himself as a man of action, meanwhile, calling for President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan to step down.
Senator Barack Obama of Illinois tried to sound like both a leader and a candidate on Pakistan on Friday. At one point, he said he would suspend some military aid to Pakistan if the government did not hold free elections and clamp down on terrorist groups. At another point, though, he suggested that the war in Iraq — which his rivals Mrs. Clinton, John Edwards and others had voted for — had “resulted in us taking our eye off the ball” in pursuing Al Qaeda and bringing stability to the region.
NB: Juan Cole has much better quotes from Clinton, putting her a step ahead of Obama.
