Romney tried to win over the middle class which he said is the class hardest hit by the sluggish economy. Flaunting himself as a skilled businessman against Obama “who took office without the basic qualification that most Americans have and one that was essential to his task,” Romney promised to create 12 million jobs.
Romney capped the tirade against Obama’s economic performance with a dig on his goal to “slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet” followed with an emphatic “my promise is to help you and your family.”
The Republican challenger further twitted the incumbent for being soft on Iran and for his remark that he would give Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, “more flexibility” if reelected. Warning of dire implications of reduced US military presence abroad, Romney declared he would see to it that “under my administration, our friends will see more loyalty and Mr. Putin will see a little less flexibility and more backbone.”
Romney chided Obama for saying that America had dictated to other nations when all it did was “free other nations from dictators.”
Waxing nostalgic, Romney said he wanted a return to the foreign policy advanced under the Truman and Reagan administrations. “We will honor America’s Democratic ideals because a free world is a more peaceful world. This is the bipartisan foreign legacy of Truman and Reagan, and under my presidency we will return to it once again.”
Romney continued: “The America we all know has been a story of many becoming one. United to preserve liberty, uniting to build the greatest the economy in the world, uniting to save the world from unspeakable darkness.[]
And, as if to warn those who may want to challenge US power, the Republican candidate vowed that a “united America will preserve a military that’s so strong no nation will ever dare to test it.”
The message was clear: A Romney presidency will witness a stronger assertion of American economic and military power.
Romney’s first task however is to convince the American voters that Obama really needed to go. Perhaps he has influenced the mindset of those who have been displaced by the economic crunch, but his hawkish foreign policy agenda may have gone against the prevailing antiwar sentiment. Like Vietnam, the costly campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have made the American public tired of war.
Romney, the next American Caesar in the making, has less than two months left to turn public opinion around. (MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews.[]
