Let me finish with this.
It’s one thing to jump on a president when he’s overseas representing the country. It’s another to end up making yourself look bad in the process.
Case in point: Mitt Romney. Now that he’s on the road to wrapping up the Republican nomination, you would think he’d play it a little more careful. Not this guy.
When President Obama was overheard on an open microphone telling Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he will have more flexibility negotiating missile defense after the election, Romney pounced. He accused the President of sharing state secrets and then added this little sugarplum: he called Russia “without question, our number one geopolitical foe.”
President Medvedev ended up grabbing the high ground. He dismissed Romney’s line as an old “ideological cliché” and gave the Republican frontrunner two bits of advice: use your head and “look at [your] watch: We are in 2012 and not the mid-1970s.”
Good for him. I’m glad the Russian president has a sense of humor and a sense of balance, neither of which Romney seems to possess in any great store. Those of us who grew up in the worst days of the Cold War are glad it’s over. It’s been over ever since Boris Yeltsin stood up to the Moscow coup in August of 1991. We’re glad Mikhail Gorbachev came along, glad Ronald Reagan recognized a Soviet leader who was not one of the Communist robots we’d been dealing with for all those terrible decades, and we’re glad that, with all the differences we have with modern Russia, we are not in a Cold War with them anymore, that they are not our “number one geopolitical foe.” Mr. Romney should write that down in his candidate’s copy book, take it to heart, and be careful now that he’s up on the big kid stage.
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