After President Obama was criticized for his comment that the U.S. doesn’t have a strategy yet for combating ISIS, the White House said that Obama will not be rushed in his decision on how to confront the terrorist group in Syria and Iraq.
“There’s no timetable for solving these problems that’s going to meet the cable news cycle speed,” White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer told the Washington Post. “It’s not a tenable thing. We’d much rather do this right than do it quickly. We tried the opposite [during the Bush years] and it worked out very poorly.”
The administration has continued to authorize targeted airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq, but it has not yet responded to the organizations advances in Syria.
Secretary of State John Kerry wrote an op-ed for the Saturday New York Times calling for a global coalition to responded to the ISIS threat.
Good. We have had enough rush jobs in this realm.
Whether we’re talking about the immigration reform action or the response to ISIS, the chatter about timing it going to disappear as soon as it happens.
On the other hand, actually getting the policies right does matter, both in terms of politics and outcomes.
Fortunately, President Obama seems to know this, and has for a long time. Just remember the 2008 campaign, and his discipline in ignoring the news cycle and sticking to his long-term strategy. Remember “Obama needs to suspend his campaign, like John McCain?” A couple news cycles of Republicans thinking they really had him this time, then it fell out of the public consciousness, and Obama spent that time quietly moving the ball down the field as he had been doing all along.
GWB would have invaded New Zealand by now.
And McCain would be trying to gin up war with China!
“Bomb, bomb, bomb! Bomb, bomb Beijing…”
I’m not sure what drives the talking heads crazier: That Obama’s so damned reasonable, or that he takes so much time to do stuff! I think that’s behind that FoxSpews bubblehead who was wishing that Putin or Netanyahu would “head this country” for 48 hours and “just get things done!”