My must read of the day is "Republicans Use ISIS for Campaign Fodder as Midterm Election Looms," in Time:
With the Senate up for grabs in this fall’s midterm elections, Republican candidates are knocking President Barack Obama’s failure to stop the militant group and looking to tie their Democratic opponents to the administration. Republicans are making particular hay of Obama’s comment last week—quickly walked back by the White House—that "we don’t have a strategy yet" for fighting ISIS.
In the week since then, New Hampshire Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown, the former Massachusetts senator, has gone on an ISIS offensive, hitting the airwaves on Fox News and local TV to rip Obama and incumbent Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Brown has touted a bill he introduced while in office that would revoke the U.S. citizenship of Americans who join foreign terrorist organizations like ISIS.
Everything is campaign fodder. Sometimes it seems meaningless and is patently political, but this isn’t that.
Foreign policy should be a natural campaign issue in any nationwide race. The problems in the world are vast, and they’re boiling over right now. Republicans shouldn’t be the only ones bringing it up, but if they are so be it. At least it’s being talked about.
In this election cycle, foreign policy was not an issue candidates were addressing up to a month ago, and it should’ve been. Calling Republicans’ actions "campaign fodder" gives it an undeserved negative connotation because discussions of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant should constitute a campaign issue across the board.