Mitt!!! Go big or go home!!!

Charles Krauthammer said it, in today's Washington Post. I don't like to quote at length too often from the writings of newspaper columnists, but some of them -- CK is one of my favourites -- have a way of putting things that I can't even come close to matching.

Mr Krauthammer's thesis today is that the Inevitable Mitt has squandered umpteen chances to speak out forcefully and clearly against the manifold errors of Obama and his administration, but for some reason keeps pulling his punches. Romney's play-it-safe strategy would be fine if he were leading, but he's behind -- way behind, now -- and he needs to come out of his corner swinging with both fists. "His unwillingness to go big, to go for the larger argument," the writer says, "is simply astonishing."

The example CK gives is that of the Prez's incredibly lame speech to the General Assembly of the Disunited Nations. Referring to this month's anti-American demonstrations all over the Muslim world -- which included the killing of a US ambassador, let's not forget -- Krauthammer says:

Obama seems not even to understand what happened. He responded with a groveling address to the UN General Assembly that contained no less than six denunciations of a crackpot video, while offering cringe-worthy platitudes about the need for governments to live up to the ideals of the UN.

The UN being an institution of surpassing cynicism and mendacity, [I love that line! Walt] the speech was so naive it would have made a fine middle-school commencement address. Instead, it was a plaintive plea by the world’s alleged superpower to be treated nicely by a roomful of the most corrupt, repressive, tin-pot regimes on earth.

Yet Romney totally fumbled away the opportunity. Here was a chance to make the straightforward case about where Obama’s feckless approach to the region’s tyrants has brought us, connecting the dots of the disparate attacks as a natural response of the more virulent Islamist elements to a once-hegemonic power in retreat. Instead, Romney did two things:

He issued a two-sentence critique of the initial statement issued by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo on the day the mob attacked. The critique was not only correct but vindicated when the State Department disavowed the embassy statement. However, because the critique was not framed within a larger argument about the misdirection of U.S. Middle East policy, it could be — and was — characterized as a partisan attack on the nation’s leader at a moment of national crisis.

Mr. Krauthammer concludes with some serious and urgent advice that Romney must heed if he's not to become Mitt, the Inevitable Loser.

Make the case. Go large. About a foreign policy in ruins. About an archaic, 20th-century welfare state model that guarantees 21st-century insolvency. And about an alternate vision of an unapologetically assertive America abroad unafraid of fundamental structural change at home. It might just work. And it’s not too late.

Whether you agree or disagree, you're welcome to write to Mr. Krauthammer directly. Here's his e-mail: letters@charleskrauthammer.com. Don't tell him Walt sent you, because the Washington Post Writers Group would likely ask me to pay for reprinting over a third of his column!