The Second Thing That Scared Me Most In The Foreign Policy Debate
Scariest, or most urgently scary, was Romney’s utter disinterest in foreign affairs, and how little he’d prepared to disguise it, as though he thought it didn’t matter. His only moment of true verve seemed to come relating a conversation with a business owner, puzzling out the source of counterfeit valves.
When Bob Schieffer asked what the candidates considered the greatest future threat to American security, the obvious answer, to my mind, was climate change. Potential for new, unpredictable national imperatives, risks to infrastructure, threats to economic fundamentals, geographic flashpoints? But of course that, like so much else, was unsayable. Romney doesn’t admit climate change is real or in his purview, so Obama doesn’t even need to broach the topic.
Maybe after the election he’ll have, as he puts it, greater flexibility.
But in four years, when we have to go through all this again, will the GOP be any closer to admitting empirical evidence into its considerations? How long can we sustain a national sprint in which one party is fundamentally unsuited to running a twenty-first century country?
