Last week marked the one-year anniversary of bin Laden's death (5/2/11). To coincide with this historic event, President Obama's campaign released the following ad featuring Bill Clinton:
In the latest round of IOKIYAR, many on the right have hypocritically accused President Obama of "spiking the football", politicizing the death of bin Laden, etc. Because the raid which killed bin Laden happened under President Obama's watch, he effectively took away one of the GOP's biggest talking points against Democrats: their alleged softness on terror. Outside of the fact they weren't able to do it, I don't see why the right is upset with President Obama for touting this accomplishment. If a Republican president had ordered the raid which took out bin Laden, do you think the right would have been low-key about it? Please!
In the clip below from Hardball with Chris Matthews, he discusses the GOP's phony outrage over the ad with David Corn of Mother Jones magazine and Ron Reagan.
The ad also drew criticism from the left, including Dana Milbank and Arianna Huffington. Their beef was with the portion of the ad which asked if Mitt Romney would have done the same thing if he were president. While I think the criticism is valid, I also feel the question posed in the ad is fair as well. After all, the ad did use Romney's own words.Speaking of Romney, I think he lost any sympathy points the ad may have generated for him by taking a cheap shot at one of the Right's favorite punching bags, Jimmy Carter.
What are your thoughts on the Obama campaign's bin Laden ad?
4 comments:
When I heard Arianna's criticism, part of me wondered if it might be due to the president's digs at HuffPo during the WHCD. However, I'm going to give her a little more credit than that.
I've never been impressed with anything Obama has done. Especially the blame game and the finger pointing. He needs to quit that along with apologizing for absolutely everything.
It's difficult to say with absolute certainty whether or not President Obama will be reelected to a second term. The unprecedented debt that he's pushed, the lack of a Congressional Budget, that he oversees - for the last two years - and a pack of failures from ObamaCare to the so-called 'stimulus packages' and Operation Fast and Furious, his backdoor effort to impose gun control on the American people that blew up in his face.
The legacy will be written years from now and while it's impossible to see how the lens of time will treat his time in office, I suspect that he'll end up on the list with Jimmy Carter, as a man clearly out of his depth. He was celebrated into office with a Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing other than having a black father. And things went down from there.
Overall, I felt more disappointed about the Clinton ad than anything else. I expected more from the president, and frankly felt that him touting the fact that he ordered the SEALs into action was beneath him. We found bin Laden, and he did the obvious. This wasn't a presidential mastermind moment, and running an ad bragging about having done the obvious makes him appear petty rather than presidential.
The right will make the claim that the president only did what any other president would have done, and in this case there isn't a credible way of disagreeing with them. By focusing on the fact that he did the obvious, it makes it seem that he has nothing else to take credit for.
This will be a tough election; the right will pounce on anything the president gives them. Bumbles like the Clinton ad won't help his cause.
Sandee: Even though you typed 3 paragraphs worth of comments, you still didn't answer the question I posed in this post. Although you gave me plenty to work with, I won't bother breaking down everything you said... I'll just hit on a couple:
1. Your assertion that President Obama apologizes for everything has been thoroughly debunked. Feel free to keep the false meme going though.
2. The reasons President Obama's received the Nobel Prize are worthy of discussion. However, I don't see how his father being black has anything to do with it.
Thanks for stopping by. If you return to this thread, I hope you find it in you to answer the question about the bin Laden ad.
Anon: President Obama's call to go ahead with the raid wasn't an easy or obvious one. Based on what we now know, the intelligence came back with a figure of about 30-40% in regards to whether or not bin Laden was in the compound. Had the raid backfired, it likely would have meant the end of Obama's presidency. Looking at it that way, I say it took guts to go through with the raid.
Because the election is about 6 months away (which is a long time in politics), I think the bin Laden ad will be a distant memory. Either way, I don't think it'll have any effect on the outcome of the election.
Thanks for stopping by. Even though we disagree with the ad, I think your criticism was fair.
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