The Candidate Begs To Differ

The WaPo writeup of the Iowa GOP primary debate quotes Mitt Romney's diss on Barack Obama and the Obama campaign's response:

"I mean, in one week [Barack Obama] went from saying he's going to sit down, you know, for tea, with our enemies, but then he's going to bomb our allies," [Mitt] Romney said. "He's gone from Jane Fonda to Dr. Strangelove in one week."

Bill Burton, a spokesman for Obama, quickly responded that "the fact that the same Republican candidates who want to keep 160,000 American troops in the middle of a civil war couldn't agree that we should take out Osama bin Laden if we had him in our sights, proves why Americans want to turn the page on the last seven years of Bush-Cheney foreign policy."

It might have been a timely response, but it certainly doesn't read quickly. Romney's reasoning is bogus, but his parting shot was a good quip. Democrats can do shorter and sharper without going shallow, I'm sure of it.

That's the only substantive jab that came out of the debate, and it's weak sauce—the rest of the articles notes one astonishing GOP quote after another, in which candidates vacillate between wholly empty rhetoric and frighteningly authoritarian policy prescriptions. A special nod to Tom Tancredo, who (as Timothy Noah notes) says—out loud and while other people are present—that given the opportunity, he would protect the United States by bombing Mecca and Medina. This is all to say that you really ought to be setting your TiVo for this stuff.

Posted by Kriston at August 6, 2007 1:18 PM