PHILADELPHIA—“In my over 50 years of public life,” said former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta, “this is the screwiest damn election I have ever seen.”
Panetta was speaking at a foreign policy event Wednesday afternoon on the University of Pennsylvania campus with, essentially, the rest of the Democratic foreign policy establishment. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was there, as were former Obama administration national security adviser Tom Donilon, Clinton campaign senior policy advisor Jake Sullivan, former Under Secretary of State and Iran nuclear deal negotiator Wendy Sherman, and others.
The Democratic foreign policy establishment did not wake up Wednesday morning expecting much in the way of cogent geopolitical analysis from Donald Trump. But right now it finds itself shocked at Donald Trump’s open invitation to Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s “30,000 emails that are missing.” The panel offered a sort of workout room for the lines Democrats intend to fling at Trump over the next few news cycles, or at least until he says something worse. Umbrage and outrage were the order of the day. While it is comforting that Trump hasn’t been so normalized that we’ve lost our capacity to be appalled by him, you also wonder if there are few things that would delight him and his Trumpkins more than the sight of an indignant Madeleine Albright.
Still, Trump grooved one right down the plate for Democrats and their PR operation on Day 3 of their national convention. The theme of the day is national security, and Panetta himself will address the convention. The news cycle may be all about Trump now and his playing footsie with the Logan Act for a laugh. You can be sure that a lot of speeches will be hastily edited before their primetime delivery.
The Clinton campaign took immediate offense with the comment, releasing a statement from Sullivan saying that “this has to be the first time that a major presidential candidate has actively encouraged a foreign power to conduct espionage against his political opponent. That’s not hyperbole, those are just the facts. This has gone from being a matter of curiosity, and a matter of politics, to being a national security issue.”
“This is the first election,” Panetta said at the panel, “where there is only one candidate who has the experience, temperament, and the understanding of the world to be commander-in-chief.” Trump “doesn’t have any experience, doesn’t know the world, and shoots from the hip. … He shot from the hip in asking Russia to do a cyberattack against the United States,” Panetta added, “for God’s sake.”
Donilon said the U.S. will have to consider “consequences” for Russia, if indeed it hacked the Democratic National Committee. “The way not to deal with this, of course, would be to encourage an adversary, a foreign power, to engage in hacking” domestic political organizations like the DNC, he said. “I don’t know of any public elected official who’s ever made such a statement.” Sherman, meanwhile, said that any commander-in-chief needs to have more than a 10-minute attention span.
“I know it seems funny,” Panetta said, “but this is serious. This is deadly serious.”
