OPINION:
When former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said he “does not believe the president loves America,” he taught all the Republican presidential contenders a powerful political lesson in style and substance.
Speaking at a fundraiser for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — a likely contender — Mr. Giuliani also said, “[President Obama] doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”
When asked by Fox News Channel’s Megan Kelly whether he wanted to apologize, Mr. Giuliani doubled down. He said he wanted to repeat the remark and added, “The reality is, from all that I can see of this president, all that I’ve heard of him, he apologizes for America, he criticizes America. This is an American president I’ve never seen before.”
Mr. Giuliani framed his criticism of Mr. Obama in the terms of what we used to call “kitchen table issues,” the things that Americans talk about within the small circles of family and friends. Most important, he spoke out on an issue that people talk about among themselves and exactly in the way we do it.
What Mr. Giuliani said about Mr. Obama is what most of us have thought and said — to family members, friends and others — many times since Mr. Obama ran for president.
In April 2008, Mr. Obama went out of his way to insult working-class Americans. When he said, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” we were amazed by his unmitigated gall. How could anyone who loved this country cobble together so much sneering resentment of us in one sentence? When Michelle Obama said that the first time she’d been proud of America was when her husband was elected president, we knew it was true.
We’ve since come to expect that sort of derision from Mr. Obama and his crew. We saw it in the Department of Homeland Security report in 2009 warning that veterans posed a terrorist danger to the public. We heard it in the president’s statement in defense of Islamic terrorists at the National Prayer Breakfast that, “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
Their refrain is always the same, and no one is permitted to challenge it. So the left’s pundit class is accusing Mr. Giuliani of having a “paranoid” political style and worse. The Washington Post saw it as a twofer and bashed Mr. Walker for not objecting to what Mr. Giuliani said.
Mr. Giuliani knew that he’d stir up a political fight when he went after Mr. Obama, and he did. That’s the important part of the lesson, because Mr. Giuliani picked a useful fight, one that was instantly better than all the fights being picked by the too-long list of would-be presidential candidates.
For a political fight to be useful, it has to speak to Americans as they speak to one another on an issue that people see as a personal concern.
It has to be a fight about something that’s either in the backs of peoples’ minds — as Mr. Obama’s resentment of the nation he governs always is — or something that’s at the top of the news that no one else has the political moxie to say. No one can ever accuse Mr. Giuliani of being lacking in that department.
Republicans tend to pick useless fights, those that don’t illustrate the differences between them and their opponents or ones that — justifiably — get lost in esoteric details such as budget numbers. You don’t talk to your spouse or your kids about whether the Federal Reserve should raise interest rates. You may talk to your friends about what we really should be doing about the Islamic State, and you may not. But you will talk about what Mr. Giuliani said.
You’ll talk about it because it’s obviously true, and because it is something that a lot of us are thinking and talking about. There is a host of other useful fights just like that one for Republicans to pick.
Start with illegal immigration. As Mr. Giuliani said recently, it makes no sense to have open borders — which we do because Mr. Obama won’t permit the laws against immigration to be enforced — when terrorist groups such as the Islamic State are smuggling their people across the border to kill Americans. There is no possible justification for refusing to secure the borders against that threat, but that’s what Mr. Obama is doing. That should be at the top of every Republican’s agenda.
When the president said that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” he stood with the Islamists and against the freedom of speech guaranteed by our First Amendment. Americans will respond to a useful fight on that enormously important point. But someone has to start it.
Tip O’Neill said all politics is local, and so it is. One reason is that what people think and talk about among themselves are the issues — be it Obamacare or Mr. Obama’s defense of Islam against American freedoms and values — that make politics personal. It’s time to start picking those fights.
• Jed Babbin was deputy undersecretary of defense in the George H.W. Bush administration and is co-author of “The Sunni Vanguard” (London Center for Public Policy, 2014).
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