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The Romney “Big Tent” on Foreign Policy That Never Existed

Romney's failing wasn't that he was too vague on foreign policy, but that he demonstrated how little he knew by making detailed criticisms that made no sense.
Mitt Romney

Another bit of revisionism in the Mitchell Reiss article I commented on earlier is the misleading description of how the Romney campaign related to the different factions of the GOP on foreign policy:

The challenge for the Romney campaign’s stewards was to assemble as big a “tent” as possible, bridging the divide from libertarians who wanted a more restrained U.S. role in the world to internationalists who wanted a more active leadership role, and including social conservatives, business conservatives, evangelicals, free traders and Tea Partiers. Too much specificity could risk driving away key voters in the battleground states [bold mine-DL].

It’s true that Romney was not always specific about what he would do on every issue, but he was very specific about what he rejected. He didn’t limit himself to general complaints about “weakness” or the so-called “apology tour.” Romney lodged very specific complaints about administration policies during his campaign, and he made it clear that libertarians, non-interventionists, and conservative realists in his own party could expect absolutely nothing from him. In order to convince themselves to vote for him, some of the latter had to pretend that he couldn’t possibly have meant the things he was saying.

The other problem was that Romney identified any number of flaws with Obama policies, but many of these were either completely made up or reflected such a poor grasp of the relevant issues that they were irrelevant. For instance, Romney went out of his way to list a number of problems that he thought he had found with the arms reduction treaty in 2010. The only hitch was that his objections were ludicrous and ill-informed. He repeated this pattern many more times as a candidate when he spoke about NATO, Russia, Iran, and Libya. Romney’s failing wasn’t that he was too vague, but that he demonstrated how little he knew by making detailed criticisms that made no sense.

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