Is Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney going to try to score big on the Iran issue — going after the Obama administration but also using this as yet another issue to leapfrog closer to the political center? The Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman suggests it could happen:
Lots of talk here that Mitt Romney’s going to grab President Barack Obama’s ankles and hold on for dear life on the topic of Iran — agreeing with and encouraging the likelihood that Obama would engage in one-to-one post-election talks with Iranian leaders.
The Obama campaign earlier Monday released an ad designed not to let Romney off the hook for his earlier “severely conservative” bombs-away type statements about foreign policy, which have included a lament that too many American troops were withdrawn from Iraq, and vague but bellicose statements about Iran.
A Romney effort to jump back into the moderate mainstream would be consistent with his strategy in the all of the debates, which is to be stylistically agressive and even disdainful of the president, even while substantively trying to occupy the center and belatedly (and some would say disingenuously) agreeing with Obama on a host of issues, from contraception to taxes on the wealthy.
“We aren’t going to let Romney get away with it,” vowed one of the president’s top debate advisors.
I’ve noted that a key part of how this plays out is how well each side has anticipated what the other side will do. And how well the other side has a response to what they anticipate they will do. And then how well the other side has a response anticipating to the other side anticipating what they’ll do. It’s not just a battle of canned material, or prepared charges, but a quick paced chess game.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.