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Opinion This conservative would take Obama back in a nanosecond

Columnist|
July 20, 2018 at 2:26 p.m. EDT
Former president Barack Obama marked the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s birth in Johannesburg by giving a July 17 speech about the “politics of fear." (Video: The Washington Post)

How I miss Barack Obama.

And I say that as someone who worked to defeat him: I was a foreign policy adviser to John McCain in 2008 and to Mitt Romney in 2012. I criticized Obama’s “lead from behind” foreign policy that resulted in a premature pullout from Iraq and a failure to stop the slaughter in Syria. I thought he was too weak on Iran and too tough on Israel. I feared that Obamacare would be too costly. I fumed that he was too professorial and too indecisive. I was left cold by his arrogance and his cult of personality.