White House Aides: Obama’s Foreign Policy Is “Don’t Do Stupid Shit”…
I could have sworn Obama’s foreign policy was, “I always do stupid shit.”
Via Politico:
For those pining for an Obama Doctrine victory for the president, here it is: “Don’t Do Stupid Shit.” Playbook rarely prints a four-letter word — our nephews are loyal readers. But we are, in this case, because that is the precise phrase President Obama and his aides are using in their off-the-record chats with journalists.
If the aim was to get this phrase in circulation to define the Obama doctrine, mission accomplished! It appeared in the L.A. Times at the end of Obama’s Asia trip this spring, was reprised in the lead story of Thursday’s New York Times, and is used TWICE in today’s NYT — once in the news columns, and once in a column by Tom Friedman, who was part of an off-the-record roundtable with Obama on Tuesday.
–MARK LANDLER on p. 4, “White House Memo: In Obama’s Speeches, a Shifting Tone on Terror”: “In his second term, a time that presidents typically set about cementing their legacies as statesmen, Mr. Obama has instead settled on a minimalist foreign policy — one that he laid out at West Point and sums up with a saltier version of the phrase, ‘don’t do stupid stuff.’ ‘There is a fundamental and profound distinction between this speech and the earlier speeches,’ said David J. Rothkopf, the publisher of Foreign Policy magazine. ‘The Nobel Prize speech was infused with hope, ambition, and the desire to better the world. This speech is built around the idea of not doing stupid stuff.’”
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN in Sulaimaniya, Iraq, on SundayReview p. 11, “Obama’s Foreign Policy Book: Here are a few working titles for the president’s consideration”: “When President Obama sits down to write his foreign policy memoir he may be tempted to use as his book title the four words he reportedly uses privately to summarize the Obama doctrine: ‘Don’t Do Stupid Stuff’ (with ‘stuff’ sometimes defined more spicily)
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