US presidential elections are always fun to watch. While I am not an expert on campaign strategy, I can't help but be amazed at Mitt Romney's continual focus on foreign policy. In
a recent article it talked about how the Romney team views foreign policy as a key part of their platform. There are really two major risks (and flaws) to this strategy. 1. It makes for an unfocused message. People are asking what does Mitt Romney stand for? What would a Mitt Romney president do? When Mitt is talking about everything people tend to remember nothing. In this type of election Mitt should laser focus only on the economy, which is Obama's weakness and his strength. 2. Obama's foreign policy strategy is impossible to attack from the right. This is not the primaries anymore, Mitt needs to understand that Americans are not excited about another war in the middle east and Americans are not excited to spend obscene amounts of money to counter Russia or China. In the last 20 years the only real threat to America has proved to be terrorism, which has turned out to be Obama's strong spot. Obama has actually been very aggressive towards Iran and Al Qaeda. To attack him from the right would be this argument: we need military intervention in Syria, we need air strikes against Iran, we need to increase spending on defense and we need to stay in Afghanistan until the Taliban (now in Pakistan) is defeated. This is certainly popular with a portion of the population and sounds nice in a primary election, but this won't win in a general election. Romney's best chance would be to ignore foreign policy (hard to do with the recent embassy attacks, but necessary) and focus on economic growth, jobs, and the national debt. As long as Romney continues to focus on foreign policy he will see his poll numbers dropping.
