Oh brother.
During his visit to Atlanta this week, Mitt Romney pronounced himself "sad" that he isn't in the White House to provide the strong, muscular leadership that this nation needs, particularly internationally.
"I think the president has been more disappointing than even I had expected, not just domestically but also internationally," Romney said. "What’s happening with ISIS, what’s happening in Ukraine, what’s happening across the world is in part the result of a president that just hasn’t been on the job as he needed to be,” Romney said.
What a load of revisionist baloney. Time and again, during the 2012 campaign and even now, Romney's "strong leadership" on foreign policy has consisted of ducking decisions, taking multiple positions and generally avoiding anything that might be mistaken for leadership. Given that record, his rueful little act of "if only I had been elected" is downright pathetic.
Remember Libya? When Obama announced a no-fly zone in 2012, Romney criticized him for not acting more aggressively and for ruling out the use of ground troops. He also suggested that Obama should have targeted Moammar Qaddafi.
A few weeks later, when questioned about Libya, Romney fled down a hotel hallway rather than answer.
A few weeks after that, he was attacking Obama for being TOO aggressive, saying the president was wrong to target Qaddafi.
And a few weeks after that, once Qaddafi was eliminated, Romney said the world should celebrate his demise. "This guy was one of the worst actors on the world stage, responsible for terror around the world," Romney told Fox. "I think we're -- we're very pleased that -- that he's apparently about to -- to lose his position of authority."
Even some in his own party recognized what was going on. Daniel Larison, writing in American Conservative magazine, nailed it:
Libya is a contentious issue, and the party is evidently split over which position to take, so Romney predictably cannot take one. For someone who is so fond of mocking Obama's leadership or lack thereof, it is revealing that when Romney has to stake out a position one way or the other on a controversial question he is unable to show any leadership at all."
But here's the best part, the absolute slam dunk that exposes Mitt for who he really is:
After he sharply criticized Obama for his handling of ISIS, Romney was asked this week by reporters here in Atlanta what HE would be doing differently as president. He's supposedly not running again, and he doesn't have the responsibilities of office, so he was free to be blunt and tell us what he really thinks.
I'll let the Marietta Daily Journal pick up the story from there:
"I haven't had those kinds of briefings because I'm not a candidate for president, and I'm not the president, so I can't tell you exactly what's going to be necessary to defeat ISIS, but I wouldn't rule out the use of our military might in any shape," he said. "I hope we're able to defeat ISIS entirely through a means that does not require the loss of American life, but at the same time, I don't want to say we're not going to do what's necessary to defeat ISIS, because I can tell you if we let them establish a caliphate, if you will, an Islamic State — and I'm talking about a radical, violent, jihadist state from which they are able to prepare and launch attacks against America — then we will lose a lot of American lives, and that's not something that we should be willing to tolerate."
Yeah. That's just dripping with decisiveness. If only Obama would just do exactly what Romney advised ... wait, what did he advise again?
I can think of many reasons why Romney isn't in the White House, but primarily, it's because the American people caught onto him. They realized that there was no "there" there, that the man had no inner core of conviction or strength. You saw it in his awkward pandering to the right during the primaries, and you saw it in the general election as well. For yet another example, he's now saying that he didn't really mean that whole "47 percent" thing during the campaign, that he just "reflected back" the ugly sentiments that had been expressed in a question to him.
When Larison noted more than two years ago that "Romney doesn’t hold foreign policy positions so much as he mimics those who do," that's exactly the tendency he was talking about, and it clearly hasn't changed. Call it what you want, but it isn't leadership.
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