S.E. Cupp: Obama ‘Miscalculated’ With Osama Ad, Provoking Criticism From The Left
New York Daily News columnist S.E. Cupp told MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts on Tuesday that she believed the blowback that President Barack Obama was facing over a recent campaign ad in which he calls into question whether former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney would have ordered the raid on Osama bin Laden last year suggests Obama miscalculated. However, as part of a broader strategy to invalidate his critics, Obama’s tactic of calling his critics motives into question – on the right and the left – proceeds apace and is arguably successful.
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Roberts asked Cupp to weigh in on a recent ad from Obama’s reelection team – backed up by Obama himself at the White House on Monday – that implies Romney’s comments about capturing bin Laden being only one part of a broader war on terror suggests that he would not have authorized the raid that resulted in the Al Qaeda leader’s death.
“You have to ask, ‘was this strategically smart,’” Cupp asked. “On the day, the one year anniversary of the death of one of the most evil men in history of the world, we should be remembering our fallen brothers and sisters from 9/11 and celebrating the heroism of the Navy SEALS – and even applauding the President for making that tough call. Instead we’re talking politics. And that’s because the President put politics front and center here.”
Cupp went on to make a broader political point about the President’s mishandling of the anniversary of the bin Laden raid. “You have to wonder if maybe this means he’s miscalculated some of the political goodwill on the left, not the right, when people like Arianna Huffington and Jon Meacham and Dana Milbank are coming out and saying, ‘this is really uncomfortable to watch.’”
Cupp notes that those Democratic pundits like Milbank and Meacham have publically criticized Obama’s campaign tactics; Meacham for indicting Romney’s Mormonism through implication and Milbank for Obama’s perpetual reelection campaign. Huffington went a step further in condemning Obama for releasing the bin Laden ad (Huffington was joined by New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin who echoed her criticism and added that Obama’s attack on private citizens who donate to the Romney campaign is downright Nixonian).
I would argue that Obama made no political miscalculation in politicizing the anniversary of the death of OBL. While he surely could not have expected the level of backlash emanating from the more centrist members of his party, what Obama did anticipate is precisely what is occurring: that Obama’s politicizing the May 2011 raid into Pakistan would force his conservative opposition to criticize the president’s decisions. That criticism could be then willfully misconstrued into a criticism of Obama’s prosecution of the war on terror – which has been applauded by all but the far-left.
This sets up a perfectly beneficial straw man for the President to deconstruct – he can now target low information voters with a host of sound bites of Republicans being critical of Obama’s actions surrounding the wildly popular raid that ended in the death of OBL. It is not a leap of logic to anticipate Democratic surrogates attacking Republicans for criticizing the President’s decision to go after OBL in the first place.
Why wouldn’t the Chicago team attempt to tee this mischaracterization up in order to knock it down? Democrats have not shied away from characterizing Congressional Republican’s entitlement reform proposals as “throwing grandma off the cliff” or suggesting the opposition party is waging a “war” on the 51 percent of the population endowed with two X chromosomes. The prosecution of the war on terror is among the last areas of policy where the president draws positive marks from independent voters. He needs to make this a reelection issue.
The argument that Obama’s reelection team wants to have is not whether Republicans are soft on bin Laden – that would be a losing one. But the Chicago team could be hoping to create a narrative that Republican criticism of Obama is based less in genuine policy disagreement but in politics. By establishing that, it is not a leap to go one step further in suggesting that all Republican criticism of Obama is disingenuous and based on an irrational hatred of the President.
It is not a meritless strategy. What I believe to be the baseless “war on women” arguably had a strikingly deleterious effect on Romney’s poll numbers in the early months of 2012 – granted, mostly among many single women who have been largely pro-Democratic constituents for decades. Republicans should be wary of this tactic of attempting to delegitimize Obama’s critics.
The criticism that the President is receiving from the left may derail this tactic, but only if Republicans give these critical voices on the left a large microphone. There will be efforts to bury their voices. It must be made clear by Republicans that reviling Obama’s strategy of politicizing a unifying and unqualified victory like the killing of Osama bin Laden has provoked bipartisan revulsion.
Watch Cupp’s segment below via MSNBC:
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
