Obama Describes Deaths Of 4 Americans In Libya As 'Not Optimal'. Now He's Channelling Mike Dukakis
Telegraph(UK) ^ | October 19, 2012
Posted on October 19, 2012 1:15:51 AM EDT by Steelfish
Obama Describes Deaths Of 4 Americans In Libya As 'Not Optimal'. Now He's Channelling Mike Dukakis By Tim Stanley October 19th, 2012
Obama has given Romney a gift with his "not optimal" remark Sometimes the President can be very odd indeed. In a pre-recorded interview with The Daily Show on Thursday night, host Jon Stewart asked Obama what he thought about the deaths of 4 Americans during the September 11 attack on the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya.
The President replied that it was “not optimal.” He was picking up on a sound bite used earlier by Stewart, but he could just as easily have stolen it from a Dalek. It’s an incredibly cold, robotic and insensitive way to describe a human tragedy. This is the quote:
“Here is what I will say, if four Americans get killed it is not optimal … And we are going to fix it, all of it. And what happens during the course of a presidency, you know the government is a big operation at any given time, something screws up and you make sure you find out what's broken and you fix it.”
Is this Obama’s Dukakis moment? During the 1988 presidential election, Democratic nominee Mike Dukakis was asked if he would favour the death penalty if a man raped and murdered his wife. Dukakis’ reply was so lacking in emotion that it came across like he wouldn’t really care one way or the other.
The Massachusetts liberal was already down in the polls, but his answer helped define him as an out of touch wonk and contributed towards the scale of his defeat. Real people don’t vote for automatons.
But while Dukakis lost points on style, he at least was honest and philosophically coherent. There is much more wrong ....
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