Hot Air: Video: Obama on terror-attack priorities
Apparently, the first action Obama would take would be to posture on his anti-Bush credentials. However poor the Katrina response was, that failure started at the state and local level, before and after the hurricane struck. The FEMA response to 9/11 was actually quite good, mainly because Rudy Giuliani wasn’t Ray Nagin and the other attack occurred in DC, where the federal agencies had primary sovereignty anyway.
Besides that, though, Obama didn’t understand the question, and even his longer answer shows that. Williams asked him what he would do if we had incontrovertible evidence that AQ had conducted the attack. Obama avoided that by saying we’d have to do an investigation to be really, really, super-sure that AQ was responsible, and only then “take potentially some action” to dismantle the network. Otherwise, he’d mostly just talk — to the American people, to our allies, and anyone else who might feel alienated by any action we took to defend ourselves from further attack.
The RNC really should have clipped the entire answer. Never once in this answer does Obama pledge to take action against terrorists who would have killed thousands of Americans once again in terrorist attacks. It’s far more important for Obama to talk than take action.