With Monday’s one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden, the Obama campaign has been using the episode to showcase what it sees as the president’s leadership qualities – as well as to cast doubt on whether Mitt Romney would have made the same call.
Team Obama lately has been highlighting a quote from Romney, in which he downplayed the importance of killing the al Qaeda leader. “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person,” said Romney in 2007.
That contrast appears to have Team Romney worried. Ed Gillespie, a senior campaign adviser and former RNC chair, went on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday to complain that the Obama campaign is inappropriately politicizing the assassination.
“This is one of the reasons President Obama has become one of the most divisive presidents in American history,” said Gillespie. “He took something that was a unifying event for all Americans … and he’s managed to turn it into a divisive partisan political attack.”
Gillespie added: “I think most Americans will see it as a sign of a desperate campaign.”
On Morning Joe Monday, TIME’s Mark Halperin described using bin Laden’s death as “totally fair game,” though he added that he’s “surprised there is not more questions raised about it."
Joe Scarborough seemed to think it was out of bounds. “The standard I go to is George H. W. Bush, who was there when the [Berlin] Wall came down, and he refused to use it in his campaign,” said Scarborough, warning: “At some point, Americans are going to stop and say, 'boy they’re really exploiting this politically.'”
New York magazine’s John Heilemann seemed to disagree, noting that the decision to order the attack on bin Laden goes to Obama’s leadership qualities. “It does in fact highlight the president’s mode of decision-making in a really significant way.”
Indeed, it's worth remembering that President Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign famously created ads that used images of the charred World Trade Center, angering some families of 9/11 victims. Gillespie, who was RNC chair at the time, didn’t appear to object, and took a job in the Bush White House not long after.
More broadly, the killing of bin Laden is one of President Obama's key foreign policy accomplishments. It's easy to see why the Romney camp wants to take it off the table for the purposes of the election -- but there's no reason whatsoever the Obama campaign should comply.
It was left to Willie Geist to gently express bemusement that the Obama campaign’s highlighting of the episode is being treated as controversial.
“On the list of things this country wanted to do over the last decade, killing Osama bin Laden was close to the top,” said Geist. “So I don’t think we should be surprised that it comes up again and again.”
Leave a Comment:
I don't think he does, the Republicans is the ones who make abig deal of it.
And he also needs to bring out other things he has done.
Since the Repulicans say he hasn't accomplised anything.
G.O.P.(group of phonies)
The party that has been divisive is the Republican:
First meeting on Inauguration day to conspire to oppose everything President Obama would do;
Second, skyrocketing the number of fillibusters in the Senate making any bipartisanship impossible;
Third, undermining moderates in the Republican Party by a extreme right-wing litmus testing by the Tea Party;
Fouth, by pledging alleigance to the Grover Norquist Tax Pledge that overrides the pledge to the Constitution;
Fifth, by refusing to pay the national bills and causing the downgrading of the creditworthiness of the United States,
and so on.
very good dis 38641
only thing to make it better - You could have just added 5 things Pres. Obama was able to accomplish despite the divisive Republicans
Notice they are chomping at the bit to pass things now so it won't seem like it was year one - no
year two - no
year three -no
year four - no oh oh election year we gotta look conciliatory lol
Joe: Forget it, you're not even in the running for an offer from the GE CEO as they gave to Tim Russert. Your not even close. So you can bring common sense back to your program and stop pandering.
At one time you appeared to be a little right leaning but now you've gone too far with your comments downplaying the risks President Obama took on taking out Usama bin Laden. Yes, this event should be touted out loud, this is a biggie, close to Prez Obama's winning the Peace Prize (which he rightly deserved for defusing the anger and hatred of countries caused by that criminal regime of bush/cheney). Every move Prez Obama makes has a political result. Ridding the world of the leader of AlQuaida is BIG! and WE should be shouting it from the rooftops.
I was a bit disappointed when our Prez announced the news of Usama and took no credit for taking on the responsibility, and not surprised that our Prez gave all credit and accolades to the Seals, which he continues to do. I hoped he would have said a bit about the conflict and worry within himself, but as our Prez Obama has shown these past years, he's "doing his job." The President of the U.S. has done well for us in the U.S., and is doing well for the world. We must give our Prez a strong Democratic Congress for continued progress and growth in the right direction. OBAMA 2012
And stop knocking our Prez down, I don't like it.
I thought Republicans wanted Obama to run on his record. I believe the killing of Osama Bin Laden is part of his record. OBAMA 2012!!!!!!
Both Joe and John Meachem continue to state how George H.W. Bush campaigned with civility and that's what cost him the election against President Clinton. He did not campaign with "civility" when he ran against Michael Dukakis with Lee Atwater as his campaign manager. As you may recall at his death bed Lee Atwater apologized for his tactics in that election. The reason that Bush lost the election to Clinton was simply because of the presence of a third party candidate, Ross Perot, in the race. I'm not saying that George H.W. Bush was a bad man, but he was certainly not a saint. When necessary to obtain the nomination as Vice President under Ronald Reagan he was prepared to walk away from principles long held by him. Politics prevailed over principle in that case.