You know how it goes. One day, the guy's the moderate governor of Massachusetts, handing out universal healthcare like it's Halloween candy. The next day, he hates Obamacare and he's planning to invade Syria, Iran, Russia, and China all at once (because why shouldn't we be able to fight four wars at once? Or five?). But just when you think you've got him pegged, all of a sudden you're looking at Mahatma Ghandi again.
That was Mitt on Monday: sort of a muscular Gandhi. "I want to see peace," he piously told the debate audience. "I want to see growing peace." And, in case you didn't get that, he clarified that people all over the world "vote for peace... people don't vote for war." What's more, "We don't want another Iraq, we don't want another Afghanistan." No: "our purpose is to make sure the world is more -- is peaceful. We want a peaceful planet."
Well, color me kumbaya! At one point during Monday's debate, Obama accused Romney of yearning for the good old days of the Cold War. But for most of Monday night, Romney sounded like he'd suddenly gotten nostalgic for the sixties.
Throughout the debate, in fact, Romney kept trying to outflank Obama from the left. No more war, he insisted -- and as for terrorism, well, "we can't kill our way out of this mess." Instead, we should help get "the Muslim world...to reject extremism on its own." How? Foreign aid, economic development, gender equality (a binder in every pot!), education, and rule of law. And in a somewhat muddled nod to international law, he even seemed to suggest that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should be "indicted under the Genocide Convention," presumably by the International Criminal Court.
In fact, if you'd just shown me a transcript of the debate, there were many passages in which I'd have been hard pressed to figure out which candidate was the Democrat and which was the Republican, so thoroughly did the two men at times reverse roles on Monday night. There was Romney, singing "Give Peace a Chance," while Obama took him to task for having once neglected to insist that al Qaeda is the greatest threat facing the United States. There was Romney, urging the use of "peaceful and diplomatic means" to "dissuade Iran from having a nuclear weapon," while Obama insisted that "as long as I'm president of the United States, Iran will not get a nuclear weapon" and threatened to "take all options necessary" if the regime didn't "meet the demands of the international community."
The debate also offered touching moments of bipartisan harmony: both Romney and Obama want to make friends with the right sort of Syrians, neither is mourning Osama bin Laden; both think drone strikes are nifty, both want out of Afghanistan in 2014, both thought Egypt's Mubarak had to go, and both were cringe-inducingly anxious to declare that Israel is our #1 BFF 4ever.
And, of course, everyone loves teachers. And research.
SUBJECTS:
