Foreign policy to lead last US presidential debate
Barack Obama and Mitt Romney will tangle over foreign policy in their final presidential debate tonight, both candidates still looking for a breakout from a deadlocked White House campaign with just two weeks to run.
Polls show Mr Obama with a small advantage about which candidate is best prepared to handle US foreign policy in chaotic world. Mr Romney will do his best in the 90-minute debate in Florida to minimise the president’s accomplishments and win the support of the small slice of undecided voters among the millions watching.
The former Massachusetts governor has been hitting Mr Obama hard on the administration’s changing explanations of what happened in last month’s attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, where militants killed four Americans, including US Ambassador Chris Stevens.
The Syria violence, Iran-Israel tensions, China, terrorism and the war winding down in Afghanistan were expected to come up in the final debate.
As the November 6 vote approaches, 41 of the 50 US states are essentially already decided, and the candidates are fighting over the remaining nine battleground states, including the critical Ohio and Florida.
The battleground states assume outsized importance because the presidency is decided in state-by-state contests, not by a national popular vote. The system can lead to a candidate winning the popular vote but losing the presidency, as former vice president Al Gore did in 2000.
With early and absentee voting already under way in many battleground states, including Ohio, North Carolina and Iowa, tight poll results indicate that the race could be decided by which campaign is best at getting supporters to the voting booth.
In addition to the political fight over the Obama administration’s handling of the Libya attack, reports flashed around Washington over the weekend about developments in the administration’s efforts to end Iran’s suspected drive to build a nuclear weapon. The White House denied a New York Times report that there was an agreement in principle for bilateral talks with Tehran after the election.
Iran’s economy is suffering under international sanctions aimed at convincing it to stop uranium enrichment, a precursor to creating a nuclear weapon. Mr Obama has said if diplomacy and sanctions fail, he was ready to use military action. So has Mr Romney, although he has said US threats should be more robust.
Mr Obama has ranked well with the public on his handling of international issues and in fighting terrorism, especially after the US raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. But the administration’s response to the Libya attack and questions over security at the Benghazi consulate have given Mr Romney an issue to question Obama’s foreign policy leadership.
The economy and other domestic issues remain the main focus of most voters and both campaigns.
Mr Romney claims Mr Obama has failed to tell Americans what he would do with a second four-year term. Mr Obama insists that Mr Romney is hiding details of his much-promoted plan to cut federal income tax rates. Mr Obama says Mr Romney cannot make all the tax cuts he has proposed without adding to the deficit or shifting more of the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle class.
Mr Romney also has vowed to repeal the president’s health care reforms, but Mr Obama says Mr Romney has failed to say what he would do to replace the law which would provide health insurance to 30 million Americans who now have no coverage.
Barack Obama and Mitt Romney will argue over foreign policy in their final debate before the US election, but little has been said about where Americans stand on foreign policy issues. Here is the public’s point of view.
Mr Obama’s handling of foreign policy in his first term has generally earned him higher approval ratings than his handling of the economy, and most campaign polling has shown the president with an edge over Mr Romney as more trusted to handle international affairs. The most recent Associated Press-GfK poll in September found Mr Obama with a six-point edge over Mr Romney on “protecting the country” among those most likely to vote, and a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll showed Mr Obama held a 10-point lead over Mr Romney as the one more trusted to handle “international affairs.” The Pew Research Centre found a narrower divide on which candidate would make “wise decisions about foreign policy,” with Mr Obama at 47% and Mr Romney at 43%.
With the country wrapped up in economic problems over the last four years, it is no surprise that fewer Americans favour US involvement in other countries’ problems. A Pew Research Centre poll this year found that 83% of Americans felt the US should pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate on problems at home. That is the highest share saying so since the mid-1990s. In 2007, only 67% of Republicans said the US should concentrate more on problems at home, compared with 87% of Democrats. The partisan gap has narrowed, with more Republicans (86%) than Democrats (80%) saying the US should focus more on domestic concerns.
In an October 12-14 Pew Research Centre poll, Americans were divided on the Mr Obama administration’s handling of the situation in Libya, with Republicans expressing sharply negative views. The poll found 35% approved, 38% disapproved and 27% were unsure. Among those who paid close attention to the investigation of the attack there, the take was far more negative for the president. In that group, 52% disapproved, while just 36% approved. Republicans were most likely to say they were following news on the investigation, and 86% of them said they disapproved of Obama’s handling of the situation. Democrats who were following closely mostly approved (70%), and independents mostly disapproved (59%).
About half of Americans say they favour tougher economic policies toward China, according to a Pew Research Centre poll in early October, a shift from 2011 and a trend in public opinion that could benefit Romney, who says he favours tougher trade policies with the world’s second largest economy. Overall, 49% said the US should get tougher with China rather than try to strengthen relations, up 9% from a March 2011 poll. The shift in opinion comes largely among independents (from 30% saying get tougher last year to 47% this year) and Republicans (a shift from 54% support for tougher policies to 65%), while 53% of Democrats say they favour developing stronger relationships with China.
The Pew Centre’s polling shows that almost two-thirds of Americans say the US should be less involved in leadership changes in the Middle East. Just 23% want the US to take a larger role in those conflicts. The poll finds at least one exception: Most Americans would rather see the US take a firm stand against Iran’s nuclear program than avoid military conflict.
Mr Romney has singled out Russia as an enemy of the United States, and the public generally takes a negative view of the former Cold War foe. A survey conducted by the German Marshall Fund in June found that 42% of Americans held a favourable view of Russia, down six points from the previous year. The same survey showed Americans were split on whether the US and Russia could cooperate, with 48% saying the two nations shared enough common interests that they could cooperate and 43% saying their interests were so different that cooperation is impossible.
