The one-year anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s killing has turned into the latest flap between the Obama and Romney campaigns, with the president’s team releasing a video last week extolling Obama for authorizing the raid to kill the terrorist leader, while Romney supporters argue the president’s advisers should not politicize a national security success.
Here’s a simple, fair solution to this dispute: Obama’s team should stop bragging about killing bin Laden only if Romney will cease complaining about the high unemployment rate since the president took office.
Why? Because both campaigns are making the same kind of hypothetical arguments that are impossible to verify.
The Obama video effectively argues bin Laden would not have been killed if not for Obama being in the White House and authorizing this decision.
Who knows if this is true? If the intelligence information were exactly the same, would a President McCain or Romney (or George W. Bush for that matter) not have made a similar decision? Is it possible, and even likely, that the killing of bin Laden was as much the product of thousands of national security and intelligence employees working diligently for years to catch him as Obama’s formal order?
WATCH NBC ‘ROCK CENTER’ COVERAGE OF OBAMA IN THE SITUATION ROOM:
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Conversely, Romney spends nearly every day blaming the high unemployment and sluggish economic growth of the last three years on Obama. The American economy of course has cycles of growth followed by slowdowns, and these don’t neatly coincide with elections. Romney knows the recession started before Obama took office, and that many of its causes, such as the Wall Street meltdown of 2008, had little to do with Obama. The jobless rate could be even higher in a McCain administration, and that wouldn’t be all his fault either.
Both campaigns are employing the same faulty logic: everything that happens when someone is president, bad or good, is mostly because that individual. The campaigns do this in part because the voters do it as well: presidents tend to win re-election based on the performance of the economy, even as their actions in office often have little impact on job growth.
What that means is Obama should talk about the killing of bin Laden to make sure voters don’t forget one of the best things that happened in his tenure. If voters are going to blame him in part for the recession, and they almost certainly will, he should at least get credit for the bin Laden killing, too.
The better option would be to have a campaign about true differences between the candidates, rather than re-imagining the past. The candidates have the same view on Osama bin Laden (both are pleased he is dead) and the unemployment rate (they wish it were lower) but radically different positions on taxes, health care, the environment and abortion.
Follow Perry Bacon Jr. on Twitter at @perrybaconjr