Where’s Winston? Not Where He Belongs

Where’s Winston? Not Where He Belongs


Jonathan S. Tobin


As part of its effort to try and show up Mitt Romney during his foreign tour, the White House is working overtime in a vain attempt to deny that President Obama has gone out of his way to de-emphasize the formerly “special relationship” that existed between the United States and Great Britain. The symbol of Obama’s disdain for Britain was his decision to remove a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office. Some have wrongly claimed it was returned to the British Embassy but as Politico reports, the White House communications director blogged today to point out that it has merely been relegated to the part of the mansion where the First Family lives (and where David Cameron was marched to get a picture of him looking at the bust with the president in 2010).


That’s nice to know, because it will make it easier for Romney to make good on his promise to return it to a place of much greater prominence, but it also doesn’t quite debunk the charge that the removal of the bust is an apt symbol of Obama’s downgrading of the British alliance. To pretend that taking it out of the Oval Office was not a slight and an indication of Obama’s issues with the Brits is disingenuous. But as with the Democrats’ attempts to persuade Jewish voters to forget three years of slights to Israel, the administration’s cheerleaders have no shame about trying to re-write history. The substance of Obama’s attitude toward Britain is far more damning than any misplaced bust.




This is, after all, the administration that openly sided with Argentina about its attempts to revive its bogus claim to the Falklands Islands and denied there was anything “special” about the relationship with the U.K. It takes a special kind of chutzpah for Senator John Kerry (who is openly auditioning for the chance to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state in a second Obama administration) to claim as he did today in the Huffington Post that it is Mitt Romney who has endangered the alliance by calling out Obama for his mistakes.


It is true Romney believes the United States should not allow its national interest to be held hostage by the fears of our European allies, even the Brits. Kerry is right about one thing. Since Barack Obama became president, Europe has not been allowed to hold America back, because on issues such as overthrowing Middle Eastern tyrants and confronting the Iranian nuclear threat, America’s allies have been more bold than the administration, not less.


Romney’s Olympic gaffe may have given the British and American press license to portray him as inept, but there is no covering up the fact that Obama entered office determined to distance himself from traditional allies like Britain and Israel. Indeed, he made no secret of this intention as he viewed it as part of a general policy of reversing any practice associated with his predecessor. Because George W. Bush was closely identified as a friend of Britain and Israel, Obama made it clear he was not and wound up embracing figures such as Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, an Islamist who has done much to thwart U.S. interests.


The point here isn’t so much where Winston is these days, though his removal from the Oval Office cannot be represented as anything but a slight, as it is what happened to the special relationship in January 2009. For all of his troubles in London the past couple of days, there’s little doubt that a Romney administration would likely not only return the bust to its rightful place of prominence but also revive the alliances with Britain and Israel.


http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/07/27/where-is-winston-not-where-he-belongs-us-british-relations-obama/