Tough Enough

“Obama 1, Osama 0” proclaimed a sign at the Ground Zero celebrations last night, shortly after the world learned Osama bin Laden was dead. Victory indeed. As David Paul Kuhn of “RealClearPolitics” wrote, “The nation has experienced nothing like this moment since V-J Day.”

Since 2008, we have wondered whether Obama would side with the Democratic Party’s foreign policy realists who know the U.S. under certain circumstances must use force and kill people, or with the anti-war left, so opposed to Iraq, unhinged by Bush’s willingness to push the constitutional envelope to get needed intelligence, and increasingly alarmed about Afghanistan. Obama seemingly moves back and forth between the two groups, his heart with the left, his head knowing voters want a strong president.

Now Obama has a spectacular foreign policy victory, and at the cost of zero American lives. In one stroke, he’s taken “foreign policy weakness” off the table. He’s the guy who got Osama, something John Kerry could only hope for, something Bush’s team of tough guys could not accomplish in seven plus years.

In one stroke, Obama has freed himself to sustain the Iraqi drawdown, to begin leaving Afghanistan, and to tolerate stalemate in our much less significant Libyan involvement. He gets victory. And he gets the “soft” foreign policy he prefers. If Bashar Assad falls in Syria, so much the better.

Obama now even has a shining example of government working, an example he badly needs at a time our bureaucrats seem so incapable of managing the economy. "Obama 1, Obama’s collective enemies 0."