Thanks to the Obama administration’s foreign policy, the United States – and likely the world – is safer from the threat of Islamic fundamentalism than it has been in nearly two decades. Who what’ve thought we’d be saying that when Obama was elected almost three years ago?
As the political commentator and comedian Bill Maher noted on his live show Real Time with Bill Maher last Friday, Obama’s successes in the foreign policy arena are due in no small part to one factor: an area of government almost completely free from Republican obstructionism. Obama’s impressive accomplishments overseas led Maher to ask his guest panel and the millions of viewers who tune into his show every week: what would Obama be able to accomplish at home if his domestic policy agenda wasn’t blocked every inch of the way by the Republicans in Congress? For the whole of progressive America – the multicultural coalition of young and old, workers and intellectuals, who elected the former Illinois senator back in 2008 – it’s a tantalizing prospect.
It’s so excruciatingly hopeful, in fact, that Obama should even run for reelection on the idea. His platform could read something like: my foreign policy accomplishments prove that, when I don’t have to deal with the intransigent Republicans in Congress, I’m actually a damn effective president.
It seems to be the message that the White House will run on in 2012. On Saturday, Obama released video message from the White House website in which discussed the death of the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and troop withdrawal in Iraq, calling them “powerful reminders of how we've renewed American leadership in the world.”
It’s a good strategy, and the president deserves to give himself a pat on the back.
Now all the Republicans need to do is figure out a way in which ending the war in Iraq is a bad thing… What?... They already have?... Oh! They’re good.