In his first major foreign policy speech, Romney absolved his opponent of any direct responsibility for the four American deaths, but he pilloried Obama for a far more grievous sin. By a wild leap of imagination, he turned this one incident into the spearhead of a vast assault on America: "Our embassies have been attacked. Our flag has been burned... Our nation was attacked."
The president's job is to protect us by dominating our enemies, the challenger proclaimed. It's our consistent record of victory as well as our values that make America "exceptional" -- and on Obama's watch, as the incident in Benghazi proved, America and its exceptionalism had gone down for the count.
This was not simply an exaggerated indictment of presidential "weakness." As he had on that first day, Romney was again raising a question even more crucial to any popular narrative of American foreign policy: Who's in charge here?
After all, what's the point of being the global superpower if not to keep control of events around the world? As Romney put it succinctly: "It is the responsibility of our President to use America's great power to shape history." And on that most crucial count, he insisted, Obama had failed dismally and a U.S. ambassador had paid for that failing with his life.
A Bipartisan Mythology
The debates gave Romney a chance to sharpen his attack. In the second of them, Obama deftly deflected the charges about Libya (though he never actually answered them). By the time the third debate rolled around, Romney's strategists apparently saw no benefit and lots of risk in pressing the Libyan question. But they still saw plenty of benefit in keeping the broader issue alive. So Romney rushed past Libya, saying, "We've seen in nation after nation a number of disturbing events."
He built his case using fearful images: "I see the Middle East with a rising tide of violence, chaos, tumult... You see al-Qaeda rushing in." Power in Washington needed to be restored to the right hands so that, wearing "the mantle of leadership," the U.S. could "help the Middle East" turn back "the rising tide of tumult and confusion" and subdue the terrorists.
Translation: For decades nearly all the governments in the Middle East, the energy heartlands of the planet, were our allies (more precisely, our clients, though that word was never used in polite company). We could build up their militaries, support their autocratic regimes, and count on them to quell any expressions of anti-American sentiment. Now, under Obama, this crucial area of the world, once well under our thumb, was spinning out of control. Lose control by failing to exercise our might and we lose our safety.
Strength, control, and national security are all parts of the same package; nothing matters more to America -- and Obama was letting it all go down the drain. So the Republican story went (with copious document leaks on the Libyan "cover-up" and the like from Congress). What had been considered an Obama strong suit -- he was, after all, the man who took out Osama bin Laden -- suddenly seemed to have been trumped.
The Democrats actually responded by putting out a remarkably similar story about (as the president termed it in the third debate) "strong, steady leadership," which, they claimed, was preventing the Middle East from spinning out of control. In other words, we hadn't really lost Libya at all. But that was the only point in dispute.
The debate between Republicans and Democrats wasn't about goals in the Middle East, where support for autocratic friends like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain is assumed, and both sides agree on the need for democratic elections, religious pluralism, a free press, empowering women, strengthening free enterprise capitalism, and destroying Islamist terrorists.
More broadly, both sides agree, as they have for decades, that Washington's overriding foreign policy goal must be to shape history, control the world, and make it mirror American values and serve American interests. This mythic vision of American foreign policy is a rare example of long-term bipartisan consensus.
