Rico's rants: The mouth that roared

Jay Newton-Small has a Time article about Willard overseas:

Seasoned foreign policy advisers will tell you that, in diplomacy, there’s an inside voice and an outside voice. Candidates, especially those running in primaries, will say the most bombastic and outrageous stuff on the record, only to admit moderation and identify areas of compromise off the record. For diplomats, the opposite is true: off the record, they will tell you what they really think of their foreign counterparts; on the record they will be full of nothing but praise and platitudes. The inside voice is for creating strife; the outside one is for avoiding it. Problems occur when politicians take their inside voice abroad, as Mitt Romney has learned this week.
In hindsight, Romney’s trip– to the London Olympics, Israel, and Poland– looks like it was going to be a challenge for the candidate under any circumstances. Comparisons with President Obama’s triumphal 2008 trip as a candidate were inevitable. Romney was never going to draw a hundred thousand adoring Germans to a speech in Berlin, and the trip quickly became rhetorically constraining. In 2008, Obama was celebrated for being a historic African-American candidate who had a positive message of hope and, most importantly, he wasn’t George W. Bush. Romney is challenging now-incumbent Obama who remains much more popular abroad than at home. The trap came when he pledged to follow tradition– all US politicians usually refrain from political attacks on the commander-in-chief while abroad– while also refusing to detail his own policy initiatives, which left him precious little to talk about.
Running for President requires a candidate to spend his days promoting his resume as better than anyone else’s. So, it’s perhaps no surprise that Romney questioned whether the Brits would be as prepared for the London Olympics as he was for the Salt Lake City games when he ran them in 2002. If he hadn’t been traveling to London, this swipe might have rated a back page reference. Instead, the insult earned him a rebuke from British Prime Minister David Cameron, a fellow conservative, about how holding an Olympics in “the middle of nowhere” was obviously easier than holding one in one of the most densely populated cities in the world. The British papers labeled Romney as Nowhere Man, and the US press declared him DOA in the UK. For a candidate whose whole critique of Obama’s foreign policy is that the President is too critical of allies and too friendly to enemies, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowhere_Man_(song) started his trip by slapping one of America’s closest allies, Israel, in the face.
What got Romney in the most trouble in Israel was again using his inside voice when he was outside. At a fundraiser in Jerusalem, Romney said this:

I was thinking this morning, as I prepared to come into this room, of a discussion I had across the country in the United States about my perceptions about differences between countries. And as you come here, and you see the GDP per capita— for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000, and you compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita— you notice a dramatic, stark difference in economic vitality. And that is also between other countries that are near or next to each other: Chile and Ecuador, Mexico and the United States.
This provoked a Palestinian firestorm; accusing Romney of racism for suggesting that one culture is simply more industrious than another. The campaign, taken aback, pointed to a similar statement Romney made in Chicago in March:

My business used to take me to different parts of the world… I was often struck by enormous differences between different nations that in many cases were living right next door to each other. I was interested in the differences in their prosperity, and how it was that nations so close to each other in terms of geography, could be so different in terms of prosperity. I mean, look at Mexico and the United States, Israel and Egypt, Chile and Ecuador.
Setting aside the fact that Romney, a guy trying to win the Latino vote, just pretty much accused Mexicans of cultural laziness– why else did the US, right next door, succeed while they have struggled?– saying this in Chicago and saying it in the capital Palestinians claim as their own are two very different things. In Chicago, these remarks underline American exceptionalism to a largely Republican audience at the end of the GOP primary season. In Jerusalem, you are not just propping up the Israelis at the expense of the Palestinians, you’re antagonizing much of the Arab world, many of whom are also important American allies.
By the time the Romney campaign hit their last stop, Poland, tempers were flaring, never a good thing in diplomacy. As Politico’s Jonathan Martin wrote:

As Romney was walking away from Pilsudski Square toward his vehicle, reporters asked him about his string of gaffes and whether he had any comment for Palestinians, some of whom took offense at the Republican’s suggestion in Jerusalem that Israel’s economy is superior because of cultural advantages Israelis enjoy. Romney ignored the questions and got in his car. ‘Kiss my ass, this is a holy site for the Polish people,’ said aide Rick Gorka. ‘Show some respect.’ Gorka than told a reporter to ‘shove it’. Gorka subsequently called a pair of reporters to apologize, saying he lost his cool. ‘It was inappropriate,’ Gorka said.
Stateside, this would’ve hardly registered a blip on the radar. But, capping off a week of candidate gaffes and staff blunders, the faux pas seemed to validate the Democratic line that Romney and his staff have a ways to go before they’re ready for the prime time world stage.

Rico says there's a link to Michael Crowley's column:

For decades, Republican presidential candidates enjoyed a predictable advantage over Democrats on foreign policy. But not in 2012. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows President Barack Obama holding a steady ten-point lead on the question of who would make a better Commander in Chief. A recent Pew poll showed Obama with a twelve-point edge on the question of who would better protect Americans from terrorist attacks. In a Pew poll four years ago, John McCain led Obama on that same question by fifteen points, a whopping 27-point swing.
That’s an amazing turnaround. For three decades after the Vietnam War, Republican presidential candidates enjoyed a consistent advantage on foreign policy and national security. The Iraq War undid much of that. But Romney also brings an unusually skimpy foreign policy background for a GOP nominee. The last GOP candidate with so little experience in foreign affairs was Ronald Reagan in 1980, but at least the Gipper had a history of fervent anti-Communism.
Call it Romney’s Commander in Chief problem. In an election dominated by the economy, it might not be disqualifying. But in a close race, any disadvantage could spell defeat. Thus, Romney’s trip to the UK, Israel, and Poland is an effort to build his credibility as a statesman. But first was a speech in Reno, Nevada to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, designed to draw a contrast with Obama. It was not a promising start.
Romney’s main shortcoming is that he has no clear alternative vision on foreign policy. His primary complaint with Obama is both amorphous and unfair: Romney presents himself as a tribune for the ideals of American greatness and exceptionalism: “I am an unapologetic believer in the greatness of this country,” he said. “I am not ashamed of American power.” The implication is that Obama has somehow given up on America, is more interested in apologizing for it than in restoring it. But that’s not a new idea— it’s been a familiar conservative refrain for more than three years, one that hasn’t quite stuck with many people who don’t TiVo the Hannity show. There’s also the fact that Obama doesn’t actually talk this way about American greatness. And the small matter of his troop surge in Afghanistan, which ticked off the left, and his intervention in Libya, which infuriated the far right.
As for specifics, well, there aren’t many. On a conference call with reporters yesterday, former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs whacked Romney for talking about foreign policy in “generalities and sound bites”. In Reno, Romney did little to refute him.
Romney complained, for instance, that Obama has set a “politically timed retreat” in Afghanistan. But apart from saying he would have allowed Obama’s “surge” troops to stay in the country for one more fighting season— something unlikely to have made a decisive difference in the conflict— Romney was vague about the endgame everyone knows is coming. He didn’t say whether he believes, as he declared in a January debate, that the Taliban must be defeated outright, or whether he thinks it might be worth hammering out a political settlement. And if Romney’s goal of “a successful transition to Afghan security forces by 2014” sounds familiar, it’s because it is the same as Obama’s, with an equally arbitrary time frame.
Romney would stiffen sanctions on Iran, though there are precious few notches left on that belt to tighten. Beyond that, he promised “all the firmness, clarity and moral courage that we and our allies can gather”. Exactly how this gathering will occur (have they looked under the couch cushions?) he didn’t say. Nor was his language implying the threat of military action any more concrete than Obama’s. Romney was similarly blurry about how exactly he would deal with Russia’s brutish leaders when it comes to Syria and missile-defense deals.
Romney did promise to take a tougher stand against China, confronting Beijing on human rights and trade. But so does nearly every presidential challenger unburdened by the geopolitical consequences of such actions. On Middle East peace, a white paper accompanying Romney’s speech suggests he will get tougher on the Palestinians than Obama has been. But, again, the reality of governing has stymied most every campaign promise about that Gordian knot.
Romney’s sharpest contrast came on the question of defense spending. While Obama wants to trim the Pentagon’s budget in future years, Romney wouldn’t touch it. In Reno, Romney raised the stakes, blaming I for huge Pentagon budget cuts scheduled to occur at the end of this year as part of last year’s debt limit–supercommittee deal. Unfortunately, it’s a dishonest attack. Obama doesn’t actually support those cuts, and they were designed in collaboration with GOP leaders on Capitol Hill (though Romney didn’t mention that). The point was to make the cuts so unpalatable that Republicans would be forced to swallow a grand debt bargain. In reality, most of Washington gets that “the cuts will never probably happen.”
Perhaps, in a bid to create news headlines around a speech with little else of note, Romney bashed Obama for White House leaks about national-security operations, which he referred to as “a national-security crisis”, and called for a special prosecutor to investigate them. It’s a little hard to believe Romney really considers this a “crisis”, especially given the long history of national-security leaks running through several past administrations. But it’s not hard to see why Romney might want to gin up a phony crisis. When it comes to foreign policy, his views turn out to be fairly mundane.