Four years ago, it made sense that Republicans would target Barack Obama as an inexperienced presidential candidate. He’d only held elected office for 12 years, and he was running against a GOP nominee who’d been in Congress for a quarter-century, so it stood to reason that Obama’s critics would characterize the youthful candidate as unprepared for national office.
In 2012, however, this line of attack is pretty incoherent, but as Benjy Sarlin reported, Republicans are giving it a try anyway.
The RNC … launched an effort to brand Obama as unprepared for office on Thursday. In another throwback to the 2008 election, they used an old clip of Vice President Joe Biden, then a primary rival to Obama, questioning whether he was ready for the White House, and juxtaposed it with a video montage of lousy economic reports. Timing it to coincide with Biden’s speech touting the president’s record on foreign policy, the RNC paired it with an accompanying Twitter campaign using the hashtag “#StillNotReady.” […]
Warn voters that a freshman senator is dangerously inexperienced is one thing. Running against an incumbent president with a few military campaigns to his name and Osama bin Laden in the ocean, is another. After all, there’s no one running more experienced at being president than the president himself.
Quite right. President Obama, like him or not, has been leading the nation during a time of crisis, cleaning up a series of disasters left by his Republican predecessor, and serving as the Commander in Chief during a time of war. “Inexperienced” isn’t an adjective that comes to mind.
But we can go a step further with this and ask a related question: do Mitt Romney’s backers really want to talk about the candidates and their experience in public service?









