Saturday Open Thread [6.6.15]

Greg Jaffee:

Today, just about every Republican presidential candidate is condemning Obama for a failure to grasp America’s exceptional nature. They say he’s too quick to criticize the country for its failings at home. When it comes to the exercise of American power overseas, they contend that he’s too cautious, too skeptical and insufficiently convinced of America’s unmatched role as a force for good.

Obama has “demonstrated a disregard for our moral purpose that at times flirted with disdain,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said in a May speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The criticism reflects, in part, Obama’s effort in the seventh year of his presidency to articulate a new and radical form of American exceptionalism. While American exceptionalism in recent decades has centered around the exercise of American power and influence in the world, Obama’s conception is more inwardly focused. It’s a patriotism that embraces the darker moments in American history and celebrates the ability of the unsung and the outsiders to challenge the country’s elite and force change.

Gallup:

The percentage of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who describe themselves as both social and economic conservatives has dropped to 42%, the lowest level Gallup has measured since 2005. The second-largest group of Republicans (24%) see themselves as moderate or liberal on both social and economic issues, while 20% of all Republicans are moderate or liberal on social issues but conservative on economic ones.

So even Republicans are becoming more liberal.

But they still think Iraq was a good idea, so they are still idiots.

Going to war with Iraq was the wrong thing to do, American voters say 59 – 32 percent.Republicans support the 2003 decision 62 – 28 percent, while opposition is 78 – 16 percent among Democrats and 65 – 26 percent among independent voters.

Elias Isquith:

For the Republican Party in general, politically speaking, [the improving economy] was inconvenient — but not a disaster. Just as nature seeks to fill a vacuum, whichever party is not in control of the White House seeks to attack the president where he’s weakest. For Obama’s first term, that area was the economy; for his second term, it’s been foreign affairs. And since the GOP of the post-9/11 years has been much more effective at coming up with reasons to kill Muslim people than it has at fiscal stewardship, moving back to attacking Dems for being soft on terror was in many regards more comfortable, anyway.

For Paul, though, the story has been different. Because if a Rand Paul presidential campaign was going to be a real thing in a way his dad’s campaigns never were, it would require a political environment with “small government” issues front-and-center and “national security” issues pushed-off to the side. It’d require a GOP primary environment in which the name John Galt was much more resonant than, say, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Paul was never going to persuade the entire GOP caucus to become non-interventionist, of course. But he needed at least some of them to feel like domestic policy was so much more important that some foreign policy heresy could be accepted.

On a final note, Eugene Robinson calls out the GOP for its “fuzzy” Mideast plan:

Oh, there’s no shortage of tough-guy rhetoric that sounds as if it were stolen from a big-budget Hollywood action movie. Actually, some of it was stolen from a big-budget Hollywood action movie: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) appropriates Liam Neeson’s signature line from the movie “Taken,” shifts it from the first-person singular to the plural, and declares to terrorists, “We will look for you, we will find you and we will kill you.” […] But do we also blow up Mosul, one of Iraq’s biggest cities? And the half of Syria that is under Islamic State control? Someone should inform Santorum that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has been trying this approach since the civil war began and that it hasn’t worked.[…] Eventually, one hopes, some candidate will come up with credible alternatives to Obama’s Mideast policies. So far, not even close.