right can t cross mccain. why is marco rubio making the case for intervention in libya, regime change in syria. why was every republican on that stage last night including jon huntsman talking about tough intervention in iran? did that sound like some sort of party moving to a realist hold on, where they were holding that debate. what i m saying is you can separate iran from all of the other muslim countries that neo cons want to invade. no, seriously, lindsey graham, there is not a muslim country on earth he doesn t want to invade. that s a gross overstatement. of course it s a gross overstatement. herman cain was worried about those mountains. very mountainous countries, that was a wikipedia fact he learned. a shrinking island. where? the guy the foreign policy, the candidate who representing the foreign policy you re embracing is at 2% in the polls.
it s mountainous in iraq. rick perry. rick perry got it. it took 25 minutes for herman cain to open his mouth in the debate. he didn t want to talk. he didn t want to talk about it. let s talk about it. who were the people, though, that you thought got gingrich shows he actually understands the complexity of the world that we re living in. mitt romney shows he understands the complexity, even though i have quite a few issues on where he falls with a lot of stuff. and jon huntsman made two of the most important points last night. you cannot talk about foreign policy in a vacuum, you have to talk about economic policy that was a great point. it s a great point. you cannot look at what happened without talking about european contagion, currency manipulation. all of these things matter and he didn t have time to get into this, but policy people, and dave, you can talk about this, we could all talk about this. the fact is that soft power now is going to rule dominant
they have to look at everything in totality and make the best decision for the country at that time. can you talk about how it has an impact on foreign policy? well, just in the sense of what we can realistically afford. there is now kind of a money cap on new adventures. i think as with everything ultimately, it s about perceptions. i ve just come back from saudi arabia in the gulf. and i found the saudis not contemptuous, but within the sense that the united states is in some difficulty. that its dominance once unquestioned in that part of the world is now more vulnerable. the saudis saying we re going to have more responsibility for our own security. we re going to have to spend more ourselves because america, as i said, it s not the god that failed, it s the god whose divine powers are suspect. and i think that we haven t talked about it, but i thought the key moment in this debate and in the coming general
benefits to illegal aliens. we need to move away from magnets, not offer more. dan, i think david gregory described it very well, regardless of what you feel about this issue. it s a very dangerous thing for newt gingrich to say. it s a big idea whether you agree with it or not. the question is with newt, normally when candidates unroll a big idea, they background the press this is coming, there s a lot of you re talking about newt!ç briefing and then hurricane newt pops this and i m wondering laughing his staff are probably learning about the new immigration position while they re watching the debate and the press are digesting it and the question is, what does he do now? how does he operationalize it? one question on the foreign policy issues. david just said a few minutes ago that the obama campaign is feeling very confident on foreign policy.
bauchmann moment. looking at this debate overall, my take away was foreign policy is an area where the president is likely to be dominant. i didn t think any of these people really rose to the level of intensity or coherent critique that s going to mean this is going to be trouble for obama. weirdly, this will be an area of strength for this democrat. and who would ve ever guessed that. go back to 2008, who ever guessed that dan senor would be applauding him for tripling the number of troops in afghanistan, for jacking up the number of drone attacks to levels it s making people like me nervous on to all of the countries that we re dropping bombs into where we haven t even declared war. this guy remember your column about the cia back in 2009 talking about him undercutting the cia. now, the cia has got to love what he s doing, going after al qaeda with the drone attacks.