In the second presidential debate, on Oct.17, there occurred an exchange that seemed to illustrate all that is disappointing with how we debate issues in our elections. It was the “Libya moment” for the United States.
Gov. Mitt Romney had launched an attack on President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy. He made a claim about the mythical “apology tour,” said that the president was “leading from behind” and that his strategy was unraveling.
Romney said other things, but when the president had a chance to respond, he didn’t defend his foreign policy in broad themes, instead he talked about how he had stood in the Rose Garden of the White House the day after the attack on our consulate in Benghazi and vowed vengeance for this “act of terror.”
In view of what happened later in the exchange, one wonders if he was baiting Romney. Otherwise it seems an odd response.
What are we debating?
Students of argumentation draw attention to what is actually in dispute in a debate. What question is being disputed, what do the parties disagree about? A key move in arguments is to pick the ground that you will fight on, try to move the debate to issues you can win and to refuse to let your opponent define the issues.
With his reply, Obama set the ground of dispute as content of his statement in the Rose Garden. He claimed he’d called the Benghazi assault that killed our ambassador and three others an “act of terror.”
If you were innocent of the twisted nature of presidential campaigns, you might wonder “who cares?” Shouldn’t we be debating policy to Libya in general? But perhaps, as I say, Obama was dangling bait in front of Romney. If so, the governor took it.
Please proceed, Governor
Romney jumped eagerly to dispute Obama’s claim. But Romney actually made two allegations, first that it “took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror” and that the attack was not a “spontaneous attack” in response to the anti-Muslim video.
Romney, it appears, thought this was one allegation — that there was either an “act of terror” or a “spontaneous demonstration.” In other words, that the definition of terror is who did it, not its results.
Obama, with his “please proceed, Governor” remark seemed to be indicating that he welcomed a debate about what he had said, and told Romney to “check the transcript.”
Once again, we have to ask, “Why are we arguing this?” Suppose Obama had not called it terrorism? Suppose it was true that the early indications of this being an opportunistic attack were wrong and it was, in fact, carefully planned? Is that the sort of narrow question that should decide an election?
Symbols and substance
Many debates are about symbols: things seemingly unimportant that highlight deeper issues. Presumably, this is what Romney was seeking to exploit. He wants to argue that Obama is careless about terrorism or doesn’t take it seriously. So he points to some “gaff” or error of Obama that reveals his lack of concern. In the same way, Democrats point to Romney’s “binders full of women” remark — clearly a clumsy way of saying “I recruited women” — as indicating a deeper lack of care about women.
Of course, if you explicitly make the claim “Obama doesn’t take terrorism seriously,” the argument falls all by itself. Obama got bin Laden and other terrorist leaders, Obama aggressively targeted drone strikes in Pakistan, there hasn’t been a serious attack on the United States in four years and most experts agree that al-Qaida’s capacity to wage terrorism has been significantly degraded.
It would seem hard to attack Obama on the substance of his policy to combat terror. So go after a symbol.
Please proceed, Mr. President
But Obama didn’t surface the root issue and didn’t recite his litany of achievements in combating terrorism. Instead, he was content to accept the ground for debate proposed by Romney: What had he said on Sept. 12 in the Rose Garden?
Actually, what he said is, to be fair, one of slight ambiguity. The White House released an official statement that was only a few paragraphs long and very different from the actual transcript. That transcript is much longer and contains the sentence that “no acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation.”
If a Republican president said that, it would certainly be taken as a firm statement of clenched-jaw resolve. However, Democratic presidents are generally assumed to be weak and so this line got parsed into oblivion. If you poke around the Internet you can hear the most amazing attempts to argue it away. “Act of terror” isn’t the same as “terrorism.” He didn’t refer specifically to the Benghazi attack. It’s a covert apology, and so on.
This key sentence is placed after some harsh condemnation of the Benghazi attack specifically (“outrageous,” “shocking,” “bring to justice the killers,” “reject these brutal acts”). That is followed by reflection on the anniversary of 9/11 and then there is the line about “acts of terror.” That distance is what some pounce on to claim that Obama didn’t call Benghazi terrorism, but was just referring to 9/11.
A much more logical reading of the statement is that he was placing the Benghazi attack in the frame of the 9/11 attacks specifically to link the two – to set the killing of our ambassador on a moral equivalence with the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history.
Sept. 13
The day after these Rose Garden remarks, Obama made brief remarks about Benghazi at campaign stops in Las Vegas (“No act of terror will dim the light of the values we proudly shine …”) and in Golden, Colo. (“No act of terror will go unpunished”). In each case the line about “act of terror” was in the same paragraph as a reference to the Benghazi attack.
You would think this would settle the issue. Three statements in 24 hours referring to “act of terror” – two explicitly linked to Benghazi, one indirectly linked. What more do you want?
What do you want to talk about?
While it is tempting to stay on this issue and poke fun at Romney for falling into Obama’s trap, in a larger sense this is another defeat for rational deliberation.
We shouldn’t be focusing on parsing sentences for minor differences. We should be focusing on substantive issues about embassy security, our policy to emerging democracies in the Middle East and the security of our nation.
Romney, one can guess, made this attack because he has nothing else to say and because it plays to the Republican meme that Obama “apologizes” for the United States. But why Obama accepts this framing and doesn’t make a broader defense of the substance of his policy – all the while needling Romney for his nitpicking approach to the issue – is harder to understand.