Since shortly before dawn on November 5, 2008, when the 2012
presidential race began, the lack of political acumen among
Republicans vying for the next crack at Barack Obama has sunk them
in an electoral malaise, a forlorn sense of ho-humness among party
activists and likely voters that presages another four years of the
Obama regime.
Those now in the top tier
according to RealClearPolitics.com
— Huckabee, Romney, Palin, and Gingrich,
in that order — have been so alike in their condemnations of
Obama’s domestic policies and in their generalized policy
pronouncements that they have only worsened the malaise. And as
others have stuck their toes in, there have been brief
media-propelled moments of enthusiasm, but no movement among
activists and voters sufficient to boost any of them to approach
leadership.
It’s still about nine months before the first primaries
so, old-school experts assure us, there’s plenty of time to unify
around a compelling candidate. That may have been true in 2001, but
no longer. As Obama proved in 2008, a candidate must be able to
raise nearly $1 billion in funds and create a massive organization
that is ready to conduct a national primary campaign’s ground game
beginning this fall. That will take a long time and the clock is
running down fast.
We of the scribbling class have prescribed a long list of
criteria that the next nominee must satisfy in order to win. In
combination, those criteria would describe someone who is an
electrifying speaker with a dull personality, who has the executive
experience of a big-state governor and profound foreign policy
credentials, and is the budget equivalent of a grand master of
chess who can save us from Barack-induced bankruptcy without
touching Social Security or Medicare.
Neither is there such person nor is there a magic recipe
for baking a sure-to-win candidate. I thought that Indiana Cong.
Mike Pence would be close to an ideal candidate because he is the
kind of calm, competent conservative we can trust and has a big
enough personality to turn out the vote. But Pence — thinking of
his family — took himself out of contention.
We need to start thinking seriously about who has the
political skills, the education and experience and the personality
to defeat Obama. We need to start thinking about John
Bolton.
At Rep. Steve King’s recent Iowa cattle call, the former
UN ambassador was introduced, according to a Washington
Post report, as a diplomatic Dirty Harry, standing guard with
“law books and .44 in hand” asking the world’s bad guys, “Feeling
lucky, punks?” The global punk community — in the UN, in Old
Europe, in the Senate Democratic cloakroom and the New York
Times editorial suite — must feel lucky that Bolton is not
our president.
But my friend John Bolton is not some heavily-armed
avenger. I know him to be the same kind of calm, competent
conservative that Pence is, and with the kind of experience and
political skill that is the stuff of which leaders are made. And
there is no reason to believe that Bolton will not enter the
race.
Bolton’s political skill and judgment have not been given
the attention they deserve. Many of the things he’s said and
written evidence a kind of skill and judgment not yet discovered
among the other would-be candidates.
For example, Bolton — at the Iowa cattle call —
told Wall Street Journal reporter
Jonathan Weisman that the Republican candidate in 2012 can’t rest
his campaign only on Obama’s destruction of our economy. He said,
“Politicians, like generals, have a tendency to fight the
last war,” adding “We have to guard against solely complaining
about the manifest inadequacies of Barack Obama’s domestic
policies.”
That doesn’t mean the candidate shouldn’t campaign against
Obama’s spending spree and Obamacare, just that they won’t be the
only issues that will drive a successful campaign. The other big
issue — national security — is one where Bolton is obviously
stronger than the rest of the field.
For example, Bolton has condemned Obama’s war of choice in
Libya in clear and compelling terms. In a new National
Review piece, he condemned Obama’s deference to the UN and
“humanitarian” basis for intervention as “a gauzy, limitless
doctrine without any anchor in U.S. national interests.”
And he makes precisely the right point: “Let’s be blunt.
The question comes down to this in every case: How many dead
Americans is it worth to you?” Bolton is no neocon, no advocate of
nation-building. He would, as this article says, ground American
foreign policy only in U.S. national interests. And, most
importantly, Bolton would renew the social contract between the
White House and the troops which binds the president to spend
American lives only when absolutely necessary, and not waste them
in places such as Libya.
What is stunning about this is not that Bolton said it but
that none of the other candidates have.
The title of Bolton’s 2007 book, Surrender Is Not an
Option, is misleading. It evokes images of the confrontational
“Dirty Harry” mentality of the Iowa cattle call introduction. But
that’s not where it came from. As Bolton wrote, it came from his
days as a high-school student volunteering for Barry Goldwater in
1964:
If the sustained and systematic distortion of a fine man’s
philosophy could succeed, abetted by every major media outlet in
the country, overwhelmingly supported by the elite academic
institutions… it was time to fight back. If the United States was
in such parlous condition that people who showed off their
appendectomy scars in public and held up beagles by their ears
could get elected president, something had to be done. Surrender
was not an option.
Bolton understands the complicity of the media in
destroying Goldwater and supporting liberal candidates from Lyndon
Johnson to Barack Obama. Next year, the media will be more hostile,
more politically active in promoting Obama and in degrading
Republicans than in any past election. Bolton’s experience in 1964
and since — in his confirmation hearings to be UN ambassador,
which nomination ultimately failed — may have taught him the
lessons a candidate will need in 2012 to know how to overcome that
media activism.
The biggest question for Bolton is whether events will
prove his principal thesis: that the dangers facing America abroad
are equally important to the economic problems at home. The most
likely scenario for 2012 will do just that.
Obama can, to a large degree, manipulate the economy so
that — even without recovery — he can claim that his economic
policies have resulted in a real recovery. He can also rely on the
media to tout even the most fallacious claims of success. Jobless
numbers, for example, are shrinking slightly, as a result of the
massive retirements of Baby Boomers, not the creation of jobs. The
price of gasoline is rising rapidly, but you can count on the Obama
White House getting campaign assistance from Middle Eastern nations
willing to bring the price down just before the
election.
Since he took office, with only brief periods of
interruption, Obama has been able to take existential issues of
national security and foreign policy out of the media spotlight.
But as Obama begins to withdraw our forces from Afghanistan and the
failure of nation-building there and in Iraq becomes obvious to all
but the willfully ignorant, as Israel’s well-justified resistance
to the creation of a Palestinian state faces UN action to recognize
one, and as Obama’s weakness continues to provoke all of our
adversaries abroad, separating foreign policy from the presidential
campaign will be more and more difficult.
The world takes John Bolton seriously. We should,
too.
