Rulers of most Gulf nations to miss Camp David summit hosted by Obama

FoxNews.com ^ | May 11, 2015

[Soul of the South]

A huge diplomatic snub to the President’s Middle East foreign policy. Now Obama, assuming he attends, will be meeting with the second string at Camp David. Likely Obama will not attend his own conference except for some opening and closing remarks. He’ll let Kerry sit through the boring meetings while he goes back to the White House.

Where is the GOP on this? Obama has handed them another huge PR opportunity. The mainstream press will once again be silent on this fiasco unless prodded. The GOP should be talking about this being one more in a long series of failures of the Obama/Hillary/Kerry Mid-East foreign policy, but we hear nothing.

The GOP is either incapable of messaging, despite the supposed strategic political genius of Karl Rove, or is deliberately enabling Obama. At this point in the 2016 election process the GOP should be using every opportunity to point out and amplify the failures of the administration in real time. A smart PR team would use Romney to play “elder statesman” since he isn’t running for POTUS. Send him around the country, put him on the talk shows. Let him pound on the them of massive “failure” and remind the American people they had a choice. Romney can speak in a way the current candidates, Boehner, and McConnell cannot. However, McConnell, Boehner, and the 2016 candidates should be echoing the same themes.

The way the Dems win is to take a couple of simple concepts and pound them into the ground by repeating them over and over. The “War on Women” theme in 2014 is an example. In 1992 James Carville and Bill Clinton perfected this strategy by constantly talking about “the worst economy since the Great Depression” during a period of economic recovery.

The GOP needs to take a page out of the Democrat playbook and start pounding on the “failure” theme. When the rulers of the Middle East bow out of Obama’s conference talk about “diplomatic failure”. When the employment numbers come in, talk about “jobs failure” and the 92 million unemployed Americans. When low inflation numbers are reported by the administration, talk about “economic failure” — escalating food prices, escalating rents, and point out the administration does not include food prices in the CPI. Talk about “opportunity failure” — billions being spent on economic and social programs yet the poor are still poor, the black community is worse off, and the standard of living for the average American is declining.

The “failure” them will resonate if communicated effectively. Unfortunately the GOP has no message. The party no longer has any core principles. It does not have leaders. There is no vision. As a result, the Democrats will continue to drive political discourse to their advantage and the GOP continues to be on the defensive.

The Obama record is pathetic. It is even more pathetic the opposition party continues to play defense in the face of epic failure.