Let me finish tonight with this.
Mitt Romney sweated quite a bit last night. He was nervous, we can only assume, about the debate’s subject matter. He doesn’t know foreign policy. He memorizes the words— Mideast tumult, Israel—but what do they mean to him? What does he have in his gut about the world?
Obama has been what we elected: a guy to break with the go-it-alone, low-information presidency of George W. Bush. Obama is preferred in the world today, as evidenced by a recent BBC poll, because he accepts a leader’s role in the world.
We are not “over” the world; we are part of it. We are a great country, but that doesn’t mean we have any special rights over other countries.
We are not a “super race.” What we are is a country wise and fortunate to have gotten some things right—some at the beginning, others over time—things like the importance of the individual, the superiority of the person over the state, the intrinsic value of personal freedom, personal dignity. I think Romney has a more nationalist view of things, a more self-righteous view of America’s rights in the world. It’s a view that is time-tested and discredited. George W. did that for us. With Romney we would be doing what we did before, what got us into trouble before, hoping that doing it the same way will have a different result. There is no logical reason to believe that would be so.
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