Republican campaign rhetoric attacking Obama’s foreign policy and American exceptionalism

14 to stand tall for American greatness if only to anaesthetize them against day-to-day hardship. Republican wannabes sense all this. To judge by the early stages of the 2012 campaign, they think foreign policy might matter after all. They’re trying to cast Barack Obama as a president who has sold America short, an impostor who has ditched the mystical belief in the unique calling of the United States that is American exceptionalism. So Mitt Romney says Obama takes his values not from the small towns of America but from “the capitals of Europe.” Obama treats Israel the way European countries do — with “suspicion” and “distrust.” He’s offering “European answers to American problems.” He’s projecting a weak United States: “We’re following the French into Libya.” The president is a naive idealist undermined by his “questioning as to whether America is an exceptional nation.” For Europe, in the above characterization, read land of feckless socialists on welfare bent on universal health care. Not to be outdone, Newt Gingrich has decrypted in Obama a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview. Gingrich wants a “foreign policy that is clear about the evil that we face” — that would be Shariah law among other things — and rooted in this universalist message: “America is still the last, best hope of mankind on Earth.” As for Sarah Palin, she attributes most of Obama’s problems to what she’s called his “lack of faith in American exceptionalism.” I have several reactions to this that all fit under the rubric: baloney! First, we’re not in 1990 any longer: America remains dominant but cannot resolve major problems alone and will in the next decade, by some estimates, see China overtake it as the world’s largest economy. Second, it’s precisely Republican factionalism in Washington that’s stopping the United States from attaining again the greatness Republicans invoke. Remember James Madison’s HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018098