Tea party and foreign policy in the 2012 election.
Today I asked Steve Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute, a brilliant fellow and a Reagan scholar, about his thoughts on the potential 2012 field on the daily Coffee & Markets podcast (the question is around the 14th minute). Hayward gives an interesting answer:
'Foreign policy was a more salient issue in the sixties and seventies and into the eighties - with the end of the Cold War it's much less so. We're back to almost a pre-World War II model in terms of the weight of foreign policy in electoral politics I think. Reagan, you remember, grew up with the Cold War, and he got a lot of his interest in politics right after World War II - and the Cold War and the communists in Hollywood and so forth. And then in the sixties, during the flashpoint over Vietnam, he was commenting a lot on the Vietnam War.What's different today is that although we have the post-9/11 world of terrorism, and now three kinetic military actions overseas or whatever they call them now, and although that's going on - and I think this shows in the polls too - and people are concerned about terrorism, it doesn't fix the public's mind in the way the Cold War did, the way things were going in the end of the 1970s, with detente and arms control and the weakness of Jimmy Carter on foreign policy.
It's harder to have a clear view on this if you're an opposition candidate getting ready to run against a president whose foreign policy is opaque at best. That's an interesting question, but we live in different times, and it's harder to make out if you're a candidate right now.
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I think Hayward's take is an accurate diagnosis of the politics of this issue, but it doesn't make me any more confident about the ability of the candidates involved thus far in the 2012 stakes, particularly when compared to the president they most admire.