Events have a way of clarifying even the muddiest political puzzles. As Americans prepared to pick the finalists for the presidential contest, the chaos in Pakistan served as a reminder of a simple truth about electing our chief executive.
No matter what the candidates say about their priorities or even what voters say they care most about, the one thing a president can do is to control foreign policy.
Most Democrats spent much of the past year discussing plans to deal with health care, economic injustice and global warming, while the Republicans danced around abortion, illegal immigration and taxes. But for all the emphasis placed on domestic issues, we all know a president alone can do little about any of those issues.
As Bill Clinton proved, without the support of Congress, even one controlled by his own party, no president (or first lady) can enact universal health care. Similarly, as George W. Bush learned, a sane plan for immigration reform hasn’t a chance as long as Congress and much of the public don’t go along. And the Religious Right should have noticed that the election of three pro-life presidents out of the last four hasn’t made abortion illegal.
The president is merely one part of the complex machinery of government designed by our founders. But when it comes to matters of war and peace, the White House is not merely one of three co-equal branches of government. That is even more to the point when one considers that we are still in the middle of a shooting war in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a worldwide fight against Islamist terror. And it is upon that fact of life that voters ought to be concentrating when they choose a president.
For some candidates, the ghastly assassination of Benazir Bhutto last week was an untimely reminder of this very point. Will the fact that former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee doesn’t know one end of Pakistan from the other convince enough voters to abandon him?
On the other hand, there are those who, while certainly not welcoming the prospect of Pakistan coming apart, were glad to have the opportunity to remind everyone that this was the subject on which they knew a thing or two.
Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware has never been thought to have a chance to be the Democratic nominee, but he is a certified foreign policy wonk. If Americans want a guy who will enter the White House knowing who’s who and what’s what abroad, he is the top choice, as anyone who has ever heard him declaim (usually interminably) can attest, even though a lot of it often sounds like the conventional wisdom parroted by the State Department.
But even in the unlikely event that voters take the advice of Biden’s many admirers in the national press and catapult him into the race as a real contender, he will labor under the burden of having too much knowledge and be all too willing to impart it. Redacting a lifetime of foreign-policy experience into digestible sound bites may still be beyond the capacity of the loquacious senator.
Nevertheless, experience is no guarantee of being a good president during a crisis, let alone having a reasonable point of view. The rationale for the candidacy of New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson is that the Democrat served as Clinton’s UN ambassador and special envoy in other trouble spots.
But as valuable as Richardson’s experience may be, his positions are not always smart. The Bhutto assassination prompted him to call for a complete cutoff of U.S. aid to Pakistan. That may have been a better sound bite than Biden’s insight, but it also made as much sense as fellow candidate Sen. Barack Obama’s idiotic call last year for war on that country.
You needn’t be a scholar of international affairs to understand that America is presented with a host of unpalatable choices in both that unhappy country and in the rest of the world. Electing a person who might actually destabilize even further a nation that has nuclear weapons is the last thing we should consider.
The Pakistan tangle also should also remind us that as much as many of us have been urging Jews to keep the Israel issue out of the debate, we should still ponder what support for it means in the context of current events.