Lightweight Gets Heavy

It's pander time for Barack Obama, who thinks trips to Darfur, Kenya and Ukraine have enabled him to master foreign policy.

Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama said yesterday that the United States has let the world down under the leadership of President Bush, who he said has been a "disappointment" to other countries, as he proposed doubling the foreign-aid budget as a way of recapturing global leadership.

"This president may occupy the White House, but for the last six years, the position of leader of the Free World has remained open," Mr. Obama, Illinois Democrat, said in an address to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs about the U.S. international role.

OK, so by just willy-nilly doubling our foreign aid budget and making nice to our enemies, they'll like us more? Obama naively thinks peace through weakness and cash will win people over.

Getting out ahead of the crowd, Mr. Obama called for boosting the size of the U.S. Army and Marines, training more troops in language skills and expanding efforts to contain the spread of weapons of mass destruction. And he called for doubling U.S. foreign assistance spending by 2012 -- a move that he said would mean $50 billion a year -- noting that doing so would help meet the goal set by British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Not for nothing, but the size of the Army and Marines have increased since 2001 and part of our agenda in the Mideast indeed has been to contain WMD. But this may be a tough sell to the tinfoil-hat crowd in his party, since they believe no WMD exist.