We’ve pointed out in these columns that the Iran platform Mitt Romney unveiled in October differs little from what President Obama has underway.
The New York Times’ Helene Cooper runs with that story, and she gets to it pithily at the top:
To rein in Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, Mitt Romney says he would conduct naval exercises in the Persian Gulf to remind Iran of American military might. He would try to ratchet up Security Council sanctions on Iran, targeting its Revolutionary Guards, and the country’s central bank and other financial institutions. And if Russia and China do not go along, he says, the United States should team up with other willing governments to put such punitive measures in place.
As it turns out, that amounts to what President Obama is doing.
She gets round at the end to Romney campaign pushback, but it ain’t too persuasive:
“President Obama for three years refused to build on previous administrations’ work to penalize Iran for its enrichment programs with the hopes that the regime would come around to his reset policies and softer world view,” said Richard Grenell, who was the spokesman for the American mission to the United Nations under Mr. Bush. Mr. Obama, he said, “is now scrambling to talk tough just in time for the U.S. elections.”
In fact, Obama signed the sanctions-with-bite legislation his immediate predecessor, George W. Bush, gutted in 2006, when Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) was trying to get them passed.
My sense is that the Obama campaign is not going to let this one go, and they may have fodder deeper than Romney’s October platform. Expect to be reminded in coming days of the following 2007 moment Romney probably wishes he could take back:
You sit down with your attorneys and tell you what you have to do, but obviously the president of the United States has to do what’s in the best interests of the United States.
The Democratic National Committee has already cut a video contrasting Obama’s speech to AIPAC on Sunday with Romney’s current campaign claims.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
