Mitt Romney is in Ohio again, his fifteenth trip to this state this year. He pledged yesterday at a campaign rally in Mansfield, about three hours east of Hicksville, to protect the military from coming budgetary cuts to defence, known as the “sequestration”. He was undermined by the fact that a majority of congressional republicans – his running-mate Paul Ryan included – voted in favour of it.
This is the latest in a series of similar embarrassments for the Romney campaign. The Grand Old Party, as the Republicans are known, has been comprehensively outflanked and routed on the subject of the military, and are ceding vast swathes of territory on what just eight years ago was their home ground: patriotism and defence.
The evidence is clearest in the candidates’ speeches to their national conventions. In his acceptance speech in 2004, George W Bush used the words “troops,” “Iraq,” “Afghanistan,” “battle,” “soldier,” “terror” and “safe,” and their derivatives (safety, terrorist, terrorism and so on) a total of 58 times – fifty-eight – to John Kerry’s 11.
This pattern reversed in the 2008 election. John McCain used the above words just nine times in his acceptance speech, while Obama used them 29 times – though the effect of this was somewhat lightened by McCain’s own war record, on which his campaign dwelt incessantly.
This reversal is even more dramatic in the conventions just past. While Obama did tone down the fighting talk, using those words above just 11 times, Mitt Romney did not use any of them. Not even once.
Remember that this is the presidential nominee from the party of George W Bush, the party that forged the neo-conservatism of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney; remember also that this is the party that coined the phrase “war on terror”.
Not once did this man who wants to be elected Commander-in-Chief of the world’s most powerful military mention the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; not once did he mention terrorism, or war. Veterans and soldiers merited not one single solitary mention. Ryan, too, failed to hint at even the existence of any of these things in his speech.
John McCain was a war veteran; in fact he had a long and distinguished military career. Mitt Romney is not, and nor is this a deficit his running-mate fills; indeed, as mentioned before, Ryan voted in favour of sequestration of the military budget.
The Democrats are planting banners and occupying what used to be the Republicans’ ideological heartland. Perhaps their party leadership simply got complacent, unable to conceive that the Democrats could steal a march on them in this way. Perhaps the rise in influence of the Tea Party on the far right, with their small-government and big-God ideals, has something to do with it. More likely is that, given the Romney-Ryan ticket’s paucity of foreign policy heft, their campaign tacticians are scared of bringing up the subject and allowing the President to play his trump card: the killing of Osama Bin Laden in May 2011.
The Obama campaign has just brought out a new poster which says :“Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from Alaska; Mitt Romney talks like he’s only seen Russia by watching Rocky IV”. They are also firing broadsides into Romney’s pledges to protect military spending while reducing the deficit; this was the bullseye of Bill Clinton’s barnstorming “arithmetic” line in his speech last week.
Yesterday in his Ohio rally, Romney ran to one of the few remaining Republican safe zones left – religion – pledging to keep God in the public sphere and in his party’s platform – a thinly-veiled reference to the Democrats’ omission of the word from theirs. But, in front of a military crowd, the blow failed to land.
Today is 9/11, the anniversary of the day that changed America – and American foreign policy – forever. Today will be a day of solemnity and remembrance for both campaigns, and for the nation. Romney is spending the day in Reno, Nevada, addressing the National Guard Association conference alongside a brace of generals. But it seems like too little, too late. Those horrific attacks, eleven years ago today, lit a fire deep in the belly of this country. It seems to have fizzled and died in the belly of the Republican Party.
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