Mitt Romney is banking on the traditional Republican advantage in
defense to help him defeat President Barack Obama this November.
In his speech at the Citadel last October, he posed a stark choice for voters: “If you do not want America to be the strongest nation on Earth, I am not your president. You have that president today.” Romney’s website lists among Obama’s many “failures” the hollowing-out of the U.S. military under his watch.
This Republican strategy of painting Democrats as soft on defense has a long pedigree in American politics. The question is, will it still work? Romney shouldn’t bet on it.
Since the epochal election of 1972, in which anti-Vietnam War sentiment rocketed the dovish North Dakota Senator George McGovern into orbit as his party’s ultimately unsuccessful nominee for president, the Democratic Party has been attacked by the GOP as soft on defense.
Even though the next Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, had robust national-security credentials as a former nuclear submarine officer and is widely credited with beginning the military build-up that helped Ronald Reagan end the Cold War, his administration could not erase the image that Democrats were national-security weaklings and bunglers, especially after the failed Iran hostage rescue attempt.
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/exorcising-george-mcgovern/
In his speech at the Citadel last October, he posed a stark choice for voters: “If you do not want America to be the strongest nation on Earth, I am not your president. You have that president today.” Romney’s website lists among Obama’s many “failures” the hollowing-out of the U.S. military under his watch.
This Republican strategy of painting Democrats as soft on defense has a long pedigree in American politics. The question is, will it still work? Romney shouldn’t bet on it.
Since the epochal election of 1972, in which anti-Vietnam War sentiment rocketed the dovish North Dakota Senator George McGovern into orbit as his party’s ultimately unsuccessful nominee for president, the Democratic Party has been attacked by the GOP as soft on defense.
Even though the next Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, had robust national-security credentials as a former nuclear submarine officer and is widely credited with beginning the military build-up that helped Ronald Reagan end the Cold War, his administration could not erase the image that Democrats were national-security weaklings and bunglers, especially after the failed Iran hostage rescue attempt.
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/exorcising-george-mcgovern/
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