Obama Among the Loudmouths

Mitt Romney is apparently not a fan of Obama's "wasn't me" doctrine:

At last week’s Summit of the Americas, President Obama acquiesced to a 50-minute attack on America as terroristic, expansionist, and interventionist from Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega. His response to Ortega’s denunciation of our effort to free Cuba from Castro’s dictatorship was that he shouldn’t be blamed “for things that happened when I was three months old.” Blamed? Hundreds of men, including Americans, bravely fought and died for Cuba’s freedom, heeding the call from newly elected president John F. Kennedy. But last week, even as American soldiers sacrificed blood in Afghanistan and Iraq to defend liberty, President Obama shrank from defending liberty here in the Americas.

Let's imagine you're Alex Rodriquez stuck at a wedding party with some overweight, drunken loudmouth who berates you about how you're a lousy baseball player because you struck out a few times in the clutch. Now, you could stand up and knock the guy out, cause a huge scene, alienate the guests and get sued. You could argue with the guy that you're in fact a great baseball player and a few strike outs can't outweigh that fact (he'll argue back, of course, and it will devolve into a shouting match). Or you can smile and nod and let the blowhard run his mouth and continue making millions of dollars and living the life that everyone envies.

All three scenarios end with A-Rod being a great baseball player. One ends with him in some hot water and some legal bills, one ends with his reputation slightly diminished, the other is forgotten ten minutes after it happens.

And just to bring this back to some policy grounds. President Bush spoke frequently about freedom (it's being on the march, it being the mission of the U.S. to spread). In his tenure, according to Freedom House, the number of nations classified as free rose from 85 to 89. During the tenure of President Clinton, whom, I will assume, Mitt Romney does not consider a paragon of foreign policy leadership, the number of nations classified as free rose from 75 to 85.

So there is little correlation in the data between a willingness to talk a great game and the ability to birth new democracies.