Heat and dust, as Florida prepares for the presidential debate
Boca Raton, Spanish for the mouth of the big rat, is an ugly name for the kind of Florida community that most retirees dream of.
Its palm-fringed shopping malls glitter with luxury brands. The weather is a pleasant 26 degrees in the middle of winter. The sound of sprinklers irrigating fluorescent green golf courses in gated communities creates the kind of white noise that will make you want to take a long nap in the twilight of your life.
And yet this year Boca Raton has been a veritable hotbed of presidential politics. It was here, in one of those exclusive gated communities, that Mitt Romney let rip about the 47 per cent of Americans who will never vote for him and who, he claimed, were dependent on the government.
It was at the same fundraiser in May, held at the home of a real estate mogul, that Mitt Romney declared the Palestinians were unlikely ever to get their own state. And Boca Raton is a swing city in a swing county in the swing state of Florida. In other words, in theory it could decide who the next president will be.
It was, after all, only 12 years ago that the infamous Florida recount of dimpled and hanging chads played out in this very stretch of Atlantic beach. Boca Raton is the perfect back drop for the third and final debate, the one that could be decisive in this closely fought election.
The subject is foreign policy, which we all assumed until recently an American electorate, obsessed with the state of the economy, couldn’t care less about. We may have been wrong.
The killing of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans at the US consulate in Benghazi last month is a tragedy that has been turned by the Romney campaign into a political battering ram. Mitt Romney has used it to claim that the administration took its eye off the al-Qaeda ball, too busy resting on its laurels after the killing of bin Laden.
Democrats counter with cries of sour grapes and in the last debate President Obama slammed Mitt Romney for playing politics with a national tragedy, calling it unacceptable and shameful.
Libya barely got a mention in the US media during the war against Gaddafi. Now Libya dominates in the Gotcha game of presidential politics. But I wonder how honest both candidates will be tonight, with the global realities cramping America’s super power style.
Romney will doubtless rail against China and promise to brand it a currency manipulator on day one of his administration. But who in their right mind would pick a fight with their banker in these times? If America wants to regain its economic pulse it needs China to grow more, not less. When China sneezes, America catches SARS.
On Syria, neither candidate really has a clue how to end the Assad regime without empowering America’s jihadist enemies. Obama wants to send light weapons. Romney wants to send heavier ones. Both are groping in the dark like the rest of the world.
On Iran, Obama will say sanctions are working. Romney will chime in that this shouldn’t lead to direct talks between Washington and Tehran as reported and then denied at the weekend. On Afghanistan, one is rushing to the exit in a trot, the other in a brisk walk. Both fear civil war after America leaves.
An election is never a good time to confront the complexities and nuances of a messy global landscape with any degree of honesty. But my gut tells me that Romney’s insistence that the US military, whose defence budget is already up 67 per cent in real terms since 9/11, should receive even more money, is wrong.
It amounts to a blank cheque at a time when America can’t afford it and the result would probably be a waste of money at best and counter-productive at worst. Romney’s guarantee to the top brass of giving them 15 new frigates and 100,000 more men a year smacks of the wimpy kid giving the playground bully his lunch money.
I am told that some generals at the Pentagon even think this is excessive. Mitt Romney should apply his vaunted skills as a management consultant to making the military more productive and accountable.
Meanwhile President Obama has long realized that America can and should no longer be in the occupation business. He launched the country’s Great Extrication from the quagmires of the Middle East. But sometimes it seems that he hopes a problem will go away just by ignoring it.
And while drone strikes may be cheap and deadly, they are legally questionable and increasingly unpopular in the countries where they take place. Nor do they amount to a coherent foreign policy.
The next president will have to decide the right balance between American values and interests and how to deal with a world that both craves and resents American intervention, often at the same time. Good luck with that one.
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