Julian Zelizer: Obama Can Model Ike in Fighting Off GOP Hawks
This week on ABC, former Vice President Dick Cheney said he was concerned about Obama's "mind-set" and argued that it took him too long to "come to the recognition that we are at war."
President Obama has two choices about how to respond.
The first is to strike back to prove that his critics are wrong.
This is a strategy that President Lyndon Johnson used in 1964 and 1965 when he tried to insulate himself from Republican attacks by taking a firm stand in favor of military operations in Vietnam and resisting proposals to withdraw troops. More recently, the nation saw a cohort of Senate Democrats in 2003 voting in favor of authorizing the president's use of force in Iraq, partially based on their fear of being tagged as weak on defense.
A different approach for Obama, but one that poses greater short-term political risks to the Democratic Party, would be to resist the temptation to mimic his opponents and to instead defend the national security policies that he thinks are most effective....
...As a model, President Obama could turn to a Republican predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, who served in the White House from 1953 to 1961. Nicknamed Ike, he remains one of the most popular presidents in American history....
Eisenhower's "New Look" defense strategy revolved around reducing the size of the armed forces and conventional weapons given that the threat of mutually assured destruction through nuclear weapons was enough to prevent war from taking place. Much of the rest of the defense budget, Eisenhower concluded, was shaped by the desires of legislators who depended on the business and support of the military contractors in their districts.
While Eisenhower's military record gave him a significant amount of political space to make these arguments, they did come at a political cost. Republicans were still extremely vulnerable in this era given their record of opposition to military intervention in Europe or Asia....
Eisenhower told his Cabinet that he was furious with these attacks. In private, he warned the Cabinet and legislators that the nation could easily "choke itself to death with military force" and that there "is no defense for any country that busts its own economy."
He was convinced that the United States maintained a significant military advantage over the Soviets. He had classified photographs from secret U-2 reconnaissance flights disproving what Democrats were arguing....
Although his party suffered politically because of the Democratic attacks, Eisenhower still remains a model of presidential leadership. His actions are an example of how a president can stand up to the perennial political pressure to be more hawkish and still retain enormously high public approval ratings, averaging 65 percent -- as the current White House figures out how to respond to these domestic attacks in the coming months.