Romney's Birdshot Foreign Policy

The GOP candidate’s statesmanship speech gets a familiar response. “If Romney has a foreign policy strategy,” says an expert, “he still has not told us what it is.”

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright sums it up: “Full of platitude and free of substance.”

So what else is new? On the weekend of a polling bump, Mitt Romney offers a fantasy version of foreign affairs to match his Sesame Street views on the economy-—take two platitudes and call me in the morning...after Election Day.

On the world front, the Romney sugar-pill approach is a little harder to take for even the most detached voter in view of Obama’s record of winding down two wars, killing bin Laden and keeping the nation safe from terrorist attacks vs. his own two-way pronouncements on Libya, for example.

The Obama campaign should turn loose Bill Clinton to heighten the contrast.

As future debates deal with foreign policy, Romney’s Empty Suit rhetoric will come into sharper focus but meanwhile Barack Obama is greeted with a stuffed Big Bird as he campaigns in California’s Cesar Chavez country, evoking a time when politics seemed simpler albeit just as passionate as today.

Chavez, the 1960s labor leader with a spiritual aura, would remind supporters, “When we are really being honest, we must admit that our lives are all that really belong to us, so it is how we use our lives that determines who we are.”

Back then, we could stop eating California fruit and feel morally superior, but our naivete had more nourishment in it than the sour grapes Mitt Romney is peddling on every aspect of American life today.