From Tuesday night’s Fox News All-Stars.
On President Obama’s upcoming announcement of a drawdown in Afghanistan:
The task the president has in the speech is to reassure the left among the Democrats — and some of the concerned Republicans who want to pull out — that we are in fact getting out, while at the same time reassuring our allies and particularly the Afghan peasantry that we are not getting out. That is a contradiction he has had since the December 1, 2009 speech at West Point where he announced the surge — and in the next sentence announced we’re getting out in July of this year.
And I think it is a problem that the president cannot solve. He has sent 30,000 additional Americans in harm’s way, some of whom will not return, in a war to which he shows remarkably little personal commitment. I think that’s his problem.
On Jon Huntsman’s announcement:
I think the rollout today — the speech — was simply remarkably unremarkable. There was not much in it. I found it fairly shallow — a stringing together of clichés. There wasn’t a memorable line or an idea.
Now, he invoked Reagan, of course. The venue is a way to invoke Reagan because that’s where he unveiled his campaign 30 years ago in 1980. And then Huntsman said that Reagan had also come in in troubled times and had revived the country through leadership.
But the difference is that Reagan didn’t revive America through naked leadership. He did it underpinned by a coherent set of ideas which, in turn, informed a coherent set of policies.
You didn’t hear any of that from Huntsman today. Now I’m not saying he doesn’t have them, but if he has an ideology and if he has policies, he has yet to display them.