by Zack Beauchamp
The above Rick Perry speech has come in for some criticism in the past few days. James Lindsay put the nicest gloss on it, saying "it was short on specifics." Dan Drezner is a bit more accurate:
I'm not sure that anything of consequence can be divined from this…. er…. assemblage of cliches that maybe, just maybe, passes the Turing Test. Still, what Perry said is such pure, unadulterated boilerplate that, as a foreign policy commentator, one must step back and gape in wonder.
Drezner follows up here. Jonathan S. Tobin thinks the vacuity is evidence that Perry sees himelf as front-runner. I think, rather, it's evidence of a political strategy. Perry doesn't appear to know all that much about foreign policy, whereas Obama killed bin Laden. Perry would much rather talk about Obama killing jobs. So he speaks only in vague generalities about foreign policy, saying nothing all that controversial or specific to keep the conversation focused squarely on the economy. It's obnoxious, but not dumb.
The Dish 