The Washington Post has a good test of the various candidates for President: how they reacted to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Here is the summary of results:
THE ASSASSINATION of Benazir Bhutto presented U.S. presidential candidates with a test: Could they respond cogently and clearly to a sudden foreign policy crisis? Within hours some revealing results were in. One candidate, Democrat John Edwards, passed with flying colors. Another, Republican Mike Huckabee, flunked abysmally. Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican John McCain were serious and substantive; Republicans Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani were thin. And Barack Obama -- the Democratic candidate who claims to represent a new, more elevated brand of politics -- committed an ugly foul.
Edwards apparently won because he actually got Mr. Musharraf on the phone. Otherwise, he, Clinton, and McCain did reasonably well. Romney and Giuliani lose points for giving typically vapid political answers; but at least they avoided embarrassing gaffs.
At the other extreme was Mr. Huckabee, whose first statement seemed merely uninformed: He appeared not to know that Mr. Musharraf had ended "martial law" two weeks ago. That was better than the candidate's next effort, when he said an appropriate U.S. response would include "very clear monitoring of our borders . . . to make sure if there's any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into our country." The cynicism of this attempt to connect Pakistan's crisis with anti-immigrant sentiment was compounded by its astonishing senselessness.
The problem here is not cynicism, it's ignorance. It again seems likely that the former Arkansas governor does not have the most pedestrian acquaintance with events in the rest of the world, or a Joe's Diner level ability to talk about them. This was excusable, perhaps, before his campaign heated up and began to attract money. Now he should have a small staff to rapidly bring him up to speed on such things. The only explanation for this kind of performance is that he just isn't interested in foreign policy. His eyes glaze over when his advisers talks to him about it. That is very bad.
And then there is Obama:
Mr. Obama similarly began by offering bland condolences to Pakistanis and noting that "I've been saying for some time that we've got a very big problem there."
Then Mr. Obama committed his foul -- a far-fetched attempt to connect the killing of Ms. Bhutto with Ms. Clinton's vote on the war in Iraq. After the candidate made the debatable assertion that the Iraq invasion strengthened al-Qaeda in Pakistan, his spokesman, David Axelrod, said Ms. Clinton "was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq, which we would submit was one of the reasons why we were diverted from Afghanistan, Pakistan and al-Qaeda, who may have been players in the event today." When questioned later about his spokesman's remarks, Mr. Obama stiffly defended them -- while still failing to offer any substantive response to the ongoing crisis.
Again, it is the lack of substance and not the cynicism that is the problem. Trying to score points against Ms. Clinton with this issue was an unforced error. But showing that he has the ability to formulate a response is far more important. It is hard to see how either Obama or Huckabee have any business being in this election at this point.
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