Condi Rice to Rescue Romney on National Security?

Peggy Peattie/The U-T San Diego/Zuma

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

On Wednesday night, Republicans are hoping to burnish Mitt Romney’s and Paul Ryan’s national security credentials by trotting out one of George W. Bush’s top lieutenants, Iraq war hawk Condoleezza Rice, who was Bush’s national security advisor and then his secretary of state. She’s got her work cut out for her. Neither Romney nor Ryan has ever worked in foreign policy, or served in uniform—a veritable rarity among Republican executive nominees.

In a preemptive strike Wednesday, three top Obama campaign supporters and foreign-policy pros blasted the GOP ticket for being weak on defense. Though they’re probably not the Biden, Roemer, and Wilson you expected to hear from, the three Democrats—speaking to reporters on a conference call hosted by the progressive Truman Project—pulled no punches in criticizing the GOP ticket as neoconservative, incoherent, and anti-veteran. “On defense and national security, what we are hearing out of Romney and Ryan is an example of the hollow force,” said retired Assistant Defense Secretary Douglas B. Wilson. “All sound bites and theory with no grounding in reality and nothing substantive to back it up.”

“The Republicans have a very long history of experienced candidates” on military and veterans’ issues, said Tim Roemer, a former Indiana congressman and ambassador to India from 2009 to 2011, but “Governor Romney does not have that experience.”

Beau Biden, who served in Iraq in 2009 and is Delaware’s attorney general and the vice president’s son, said the Romney-Ryan ticket wants it both ways on defense spending: Supporting costly wars and expensive weaponry provided by contractors, while undermining benefits for those who serve in uniform, even as vets are getting hard with disabilities and unemployment. Citing a Veteran’s Day 2011 campaign appearance by Romney in South Carolina, Biden said, “He chose that day to propose his voucherization of the [Department of Veterans Affairs], which is a not-so-elegant euphemism for privatization of the VA.” (Here’s a video of Romney’s privatization speech.)

Governor Roemer cast the Republicans’ security policy as trading on tax cuts for the rich. “Romney has threatened to turn health care for veterans into coupons for veterans,” he said. “You cannot put a pricetag on a veteran who has served overseas.” Wilson hit Ryan’s unpopular budget proposals: “Ryan’s plan cuts everything from defense that isn’t a gun,” he said. “I think you have some quesions from returning vets and their families on just what that means for them.”

The Democrats also flagged misguided hawkishness in Romney’s foreign policy. “He’s said Russia is the United States’ number one political foe,” Roemer said, adding that the Republican nominee had a Cold War mindset and “an alarming lack of understanding of the threats of the 21st century, like cyber security, proliferation of nuclear weapons, and cells of Al Qaeda and the Haqqani network that want to kill Americans.”

Blame the usual suspects: Romney is relying on neoconservative hawks from previous Republican administrations. “It’s back to the future,” as Wilson put it. “Americans want America to be strong. They want America to lead. But they differentiate that from beating their chests and charging headlong off a cliff.”

Will Rice be taken seriously when she steps up to the podium and claims that Romney could lead America’s military better than Barack Obama can? As Roemer pointed out, Rice has repeatedly met with Obama on defense issues, and she has publicly defended or extolled his decisions as commander in chief, on Libya and in general.

“Nothing in this president’s methods suggests this president is other than a defender of America’s interests,” Rice said of Obama in 2010.

Last month she told an audience at Harvard that Obama’s election—”that final hurdle”—was an inspiring example to the rest of the world of US national values. Of the president’s tribulations, she added, “Americans are very tough on their presidents. The day that they’re inaugurated, they’re the smartest, most amazing person on the face of the earth. And a year and a half later, it’s: ‘How did we ever elect him?’ I think President Obama is experiencing some of that right now.”

And just this morning on CBS, when asked to name a specific Obama failure on foreign policy, Rice equivocated. “It’s not a time to look back,” she said, “it’s a time to look forward.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate