Obama describes deaths of 4 Americans in Libya as 'not optimal'. Now he's channelling Mike Dukakis

Last updated: October 19th, 2012

Obama has given Romney a gift with his "not optimal" remark

Sometimes the President can be very odd indeed. In a pre-recorded interview with The Daily Show on Thursday night, host Jon Stewart asked Obama what he thought about the deaths of 4 Americans during the September 11 attack on the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya. The President replied that it was “not optimal.” He was picking up on a sound bite used earlier by Stewart, but he could just as easily have stolen it from a Dalek. It’s an incredibly cold, robotic and insensitive way to describe a human tragedy. This is the quote:

“Here is what I will say, if four Americans get killed it is not optimal … And we are going to fix it, all of it. And what happens during the course of a presidency, you know the government is a big operation at any given time, something screws up and you make sure you find out what's broken and you fix it.”


Is this Obama’s Dukakis moment? During the 1988 presidential election, Democratic nominee Mike Dukakis was asked if he would favour the death penalty if a man raped and murdered his wife. Dukakis’ reply was so lacking in emotion that it came across like he wouldn’t really care one way or the other. The Massachusetts liberal was already down in the polls, but his answer helped define him as an out of touch wonk and contributed towards the scale of his defeat. Real people don’t vote for automatons.

But while Dukakis lost points on style, he at least was honest and philosophically coherent. There is much more wrong with what Obama said to Jon Stewart than just the “not optimal” line. First, it feels like we’ve learned more about what happened in Libya from debates and TV appearances than we ever got from official announcements – which avoided calling this a terrorist attack for two weeks. On this occasion, Obama admitted to Stewart that something had screwed up. Combine that with his declaration in Thursday’s debate that responsibility lies with him and him alone and you could infer that he’s starting to appreciate the scale of the disaster that happened on his watch.

But vagueness remains. When Stewart pressed the President on why some members of his administration called it a riot when it was actually a terrorist attack, Obama said, “John, the truth is that information comes in, folks put it out throughout the process, people say it is still incomplete.” However, for two weeks some members of the administration (not all) were rather definite in saying this was not a terrorist attack. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on September 14: “We were not aware of any actionable intelligence indicating that an attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi was planned or imminent." UN Ambassador Susan Rice on September 16, “We do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned.” Jay Carney on September 18: “Our belief, based on the information we have, is it was the video that caused the unrest in Cairo, and the video and the unrest in Cairo that helped — that precipitated some of the unrest in Benghazi and elsewhere.”

The problem with all these statements is that other reports indicate that the administration knew within 24 hours that the incident in Benghazi was a terrorist attack. If that’s true, then – contrary to what Obama told Stewart on Thursday night – the administration did not share everything it knew with the American people. That would make Obama less like Dukakis and more like Nixon.

Next Monday brings a presidential debate dedicated to foreign policy. By then, the phrase “not optimal” might be in common usage. Perhaps this time Mitt Romney will land a few punches on the subject of Libya.


*Source: UK Telegraph