This is Herman Cain Boning Up on Foreign Policy!!
Every time I think I’m done picking on Herman Cain’s absence of foreign policy thought, his campaign pulls me back in! According to The Daily Caller, Cain is planning to give a major foreign policy address… er… at some point. Which, given his frontrunner status, is probably a good thing. I’d leave it at that, ...
Every time I think I'm done picking on Herman Cain's absence of foreign policy thought, his campaign pulls me back in!
Every time I think I’m done picking on Herman Cain’s absence of foreign policy thought, his campaign pulls me back in!
According to The Daily Caller, Cain is planning to give a major foreign policy address… er… at some point. Which, given his frontrunner status, is probably a good thing.
I’d leave it at that, except that this story clearly represents the Cain campaign’s efforts to push back on the notion that he doesn’t know enough about foreign affairs. And so we get… the following:
Almost every day, Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain is handed a one-page briefing from his chief foreign policy adviser on news from around the world.
It’s one of several things his campaign says the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO, who has never held elective office before, is now doing to bone up on foreign policy — especially as he faces a big test in November at a GOP debate on national security issues.
“He’s really getting up to speed a lot more so than people give him credit for,” J.D. Gordon, Cain’s foreign policy and national security adviser who prepares the briefings, said in an interview with The Daily Caller on Monday….
Gordon says Cain has been receiving counsel from people well known in the foreign policy community. While Gordon won’t say who Cain talks with, Cain has admitted he admires people like former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton.
Other steps Cain has taken to educate himself about foreign policy, Gordon said, include his visit to Israel in August “to learn the facts on the ground.”
“He met with the deputy prime minister and the mayor of Jerusalem,” Gordon said (emphasis added).
It’s the "almost" that kills me.
Look, I get that Cain is going to put the United back in the United States of America, and the economy is really, really super-important. So are the decisions to expend blood and treasure around the world, however. This kind of spin on Cain’s foreign policy interest — and, bear in mind, spin is the comparative advantage of Cain’s chief foreign policy advisor — is just f***ing absurd.
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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