At the presidential debates a year and a half from now, the Republican candidate will go on a strong attack noting that his/her party and his/her's alone protects the American public from another round of economic disaster. Only the Republicans can be counted on to defend the country against inflation, deficits and fiscal miscalculation. Only the Republicans know how to say no to economic hubris. Then the unfortunate Republican candidate will make a fatal mistake and mention, even once, foreign policy. At that point, the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama will simply say that Bin Laden, American's worst enemy, feared him most. He'll quote a little bit from the Bin Laden diaries, maybe get a laugh or two about how Bin Laden said in effect, "Ignore Biden, get Obama," and then get back to putting his Republican opponent into a very uncomfortable position. Oppose me and you help the Bin Laden's of this world - or something like that. Go below the fold and find out more about why all this is a case of what goes around eventually comes back around.
To win re-election in 2004, W had a simple message. Don't change horses in the middle of a battle against terrorism. Often, when W faced a challenge of any sort - domestic or foreign, he'd have Rove and the Right Wing echo chamber put out the message that opposing W only helped the terrorists win. It was crude and wrong, but it worked more often than it failed.
Now a variation on a theme that worked for W may be coming back around to the benefit of Obama. Bin Laden's diaries reveal a deep concern that Obama was Al Queda's true enemy. By accident or design, the Americans had put before the world a leader and a face that made Al Queda's claims of an evil, reactionary America hard to sustain. Two years ago one of Obama's early acts was to go to Egypt and give a speech that helped set today's Arab Spring in motion. With a shrewdness one would expect of Bin Laden, the terrorist leader read the danger to his group and declared that the true solution to this threat to Al Queda was to kill the American leader. For Bin Laden it was kill or be killed. And he was right.
Of all that the young Obama administration has accomplished - health care reform, the auto industry rescue, the short-term healing of the economy, ending discrimination against gays in the military, and so on - the Bin Laden diaries may be the kryptonite they have finally found for warding off hard core Republican attacks. The Tea Party wing may remain faithful to their views of the President, but the rest of them will have to learn to keep their rhetoric strictly domestic. As unpleasant as it may be, they will have to unlearn the words terrorism, foreign policy, Middle East and so on lest they end up like the candidate with whom I began this diary. The one who went too far and said something that let the President remind us whom the terrorist feared.