Thread: Gaddafi's defeat will not save Obama's presidency

Gaddafi's defeat will not save Obama's presidency

By Tim Stanley
Last updated: August 22nd, 2011


Gaddafi's fall won't affect Obama's poll numbers

It looks like Barack Obama has added another scalp to his collection. Colonel Gaddafi could be about to join Osama bin Laden on the list of villains that have fallen under this administration. Obama’s foreign policy reflects his temperament: cool and methodical. He played the long game with both men; gathering intelligence and applying pressure before taking action. The West’s unofficial war against Gaddafi’s regime has almost become banal. But it seems to have worked, and Obama deserves credit for that.

The problem is that he probably won’t get any. Since its inception, there has been no constituency for this war. Obama was forced to intervene in Libya to compensate for his delayed response to the Arab Spring, when his cautious approach to the collapse of Mubarak’s regime was ridiculed as dithering. The Libyan operation had none of the glamour of the invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan: TV footage was of groups of Arab men shooting at each other in desert towns, not young Americans kicking ass in combat gear and Ray-Bans. The public were unmoved. Obama’s Gallup approval ratings actually fell after the conflict began. That doesn’t bode well for his re-election because voters ordinarily rally around their President during foreign policy crises. Even Jimmy Carter went up in the polls after American hostages were seized at the US embassy in Tehran in 1979.

Congressional liberals have fiercely opposed the conflict. They were outraged when the President didn’t bother to seek congressional approval for the war after the traditional 60-day limit had expired. That was a mistake, because he probably could have won it and helped weaken the conservative coalition within the Republican caucus (which is what Bill Clinton did when he got Republican Bob Dole’s backing for the bombing of Bosnia in 1995). Ordinarily, Republicans are hawks and the NATO campaign might have peeled away a few of their voters over to the President’s side. But the Republican Party is going through one of its periodic spells of isolationism (which usually coincide with it being out of office). Michele Bachmann was critical of Obama’s intervention from day one. She speculated that 10,000 to 30,000 people might have died in NATO airstrike. Even neoconservative hawks have denounced the campaign because of its lack of vim and vigor. Former UN ambassador John Bolton argued that the President had set himself up for “massive strategic failureâ€

It's really arrogant for Obama to take credit for it. It's not his war, it's the people of Libya's Liberation.

Obama can only fake out people stupid enough to vote for him.

Dixie

They look like twins!

Taxpayers/voters of America we do not want to make same mistake twice.

I dont think it hurts or helps him.Most people here only care about whats going on in U.S.Reagan tried to get him in 1986 but missed and killed one of his family members.But right now people are hurting for jobs to care if Gaddafis fall.