We’re hearing some chatter about how the Paris terrorist attacks may have transformed the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary campaign.
It might be now a “test for commander in chief,” says Politico’s Shane Goldmacher.
Good. We need something to bring us back to what’s really at stake.
To this point in the GOP campaign, it’s been a battle of sound bites, insults (and the occasional name-calling) and wonderment over how Donald Trump has stayed at or near the top of a slowly shrinking Republican Party field.
The issue now may be turning toward deciding which of these individuals is best suited to handling the serious threat that the Islamic State potentially poses against the United States.
As Politico reported: “It’s one thing to have a protest vote,” New York Republican Rep. Pete King, a member of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee and chairman of the subcommittee on counterterrorism and intelligence, told POLITICO. “If anything good can come of this tragedy, I would hope it would steer the debate toward who can handle Al Qaeda and ISIS and away from sound bites.”
Trump has won the sound bite battle to this point.
But if ISIS is the threat that many observers now say it is — in the wake of the highly coordinated attacks in Paris — then we need to separate the experts from the entertainers.
I hope that with quite a few serious-minded individuals still seeking the GOP nomination that primary voters are going to assess the value of actual experience in the political arena against individuals who — time and again — demonstrate their inability to navigate across a complicated global landscape.
As U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida — one of the serious individuals running for the GOP nomination — said this morning, the first priority for a president is to keep Americans safe from our enemies.
Show time is over.
I hope …
