President Obama’s display of leadership in directing the killing of Osama bin Laden raises the prospect that American politics can move away from mindless debates over the president’s loyalties and fortitude. Perhaps the 2012 campaign might even shift to real issues, like the economy and the major parties’ competing visions of government’s role.
The baseless critique of Mr. Obama as a frightened lamb among the world’s wolves was started in the 2008 campaign when Senators John McCain and Hillary Rodham Clinton derided his ability to manage world affairs. “It’s got to do with experience, knowledge and judgment,” Mr. McCain said, “none of which Senator Obama has.”
The myth that he was a naïve hand-wringer persisted, despite his decisions to reduce troops in Iraq, strengthen them in Afghanistan and join a coalition to halt the Qaddafi regime’s bloodshed in Libya. His administration took too long to find its footing on Egypt’s transition and in Libya, but it was not because, as the popular conservative blog RedState said, he is a “trainee president.”
The blog accused Mr. Obama of basing his foreign policy on an “effete, pampered background” and a delight in consensus, and Republican presidential candidates quickly got the idea. Tim Pawlenty said in March that Mr. Obama was more worried about his international popularity than keeping the nation secure. And just a few weeks ago, Mitt Romney accused him of being timid, tentative, and apologetic, all qualities stemming from “his fundamental disbelief in American exceptionalism.”
One of the subtexts to this argument is that Mr. Obama is not a true American, a thread soaked in the politics of fear and racial intolerance that runs through so much of the anti-Obama right. Donald Trump’s nativist claim that the president is not a citizen had its foreign-policy equivalent last year in Newt Gingrich’s repellent remark that Mr. Obama exhibits “Kenyan, anticolonial behavior.”
But just as releasing a birth certificate marginalized one falsehood, Mr. Obama’s risky and audacious decision to attack the Bin Laden compound in Pakistan has demolished the notion that he cannot make tough decisions or cares primarily about the nation’s image abroad.
One clear sign of Republican unease is that some, like Rick Santorum, are trying to claim that Bin Laden’s killing was an isolated event that proves nothing. That argument sounds hollow and desperate, and most Republicans are giving the president the credit he deserves.
There is still plenty of room for them to make politically coded attacks on Mr. Obama’s domestic policies that have nothing to do with real substance — saying he is a socialist who is trying to redistribute wealth, for example. But if — oh, if — they now make the 2012 race about issues that really matter, such as rebuilding the economy and the future of the government safety net, the nation will get the campaign it needs.
