We just began bombing Syria on Monday. We’ve come to loggerheads with Putin’s Russia. We’re back in Iraq (though “no boots on the ground” still holds some dubious sway in Obama’s Middle East foreign policy). And it doesn’t seem like we ever really left Afghanistan, despite all the rhetoric about it. And yet, in the 2012 presidential election, these very possibilities and policies were being touted by Romney and being mocked by Joe Biden. Here’s what Biden actually said in 2012:
And listen to what [Romney] says about foreign policy. You caught some of it in his speech. He said it was a mistake to end the war in Iraq and bring all of our warriors home. He said it was a mistake to set an end date for our warriors in Afghanistan and bring them home. He implies by the speech that he’s ready to go to war in Syria and Iran. He wants to move from cooperation to confrontation with Putin’s Russia. And these guys say the president’s out of touch?
Yes, well. That is rather embarrassing, isn’t it? Because pretty much everything Biden said Romney believed has become the governing policy for Obama in just two short years. But this should come as no surprise. Because the hard fact is that Romney really wasn’t that different from Obama. And Obama never really was that different from Romney. The election in 2012 wasn’t a real option between two political ideologies. It was just a choice of two different flavors from the same brand: the big-government brand.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of American democracy is that the people still believe in it long after it has died. When all the electoral options are substantially identical, you really don’t have a choice anymore. It’s time we woke up to that fact. It may already be too late.