The Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman told Democrats in Charlotte that President Obama restored America on the world stage after the country’s “moral authority was in tatters” and Iran was “marching towards a nuclear weapon unchecked.”
“It took President Obama to make America lead like America again,” said Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) in his DNC address. “…Ask Osama bin Laden is he is better off now than he was four years ago.”
Kerry slammed fellow Massachusetts politician Mitt Romney for having “all these neocon advisers who know all the wrong things about foreign policy” and called him “an extreme and expedient candidate who lacks the judgment and the vision so vital to the Oval Office, the most inexperienced foreign policy twosome to run for president and vice president in decades.”
“Our opponents like to talk about American exceptionalism, but all they do is talk,” he said. “…And despite what you heard in Tampa, an exceptional country does care about the rise of the oceans and the future of the planet. That is a responsibility from the Scriptures. And that too is a responsibility of the leader of the free world.”
“The only thing exceptional about today’s Republicans is that almost without exception, they oppose everything that has made America exceptional in the first place. An exceptional nation demands exceptional leadership.”
Kerry said the GOP “has lied about where this president stands and what this president has done” in regard to relations with Israel.
“But Prime Minister Netanyahu set the record straight. He said our two countries have exactly the same policy,” he said. “Our security cooperation is unprecedented. And when it comes to Israel, my friends, I’ll take the word of Israel’s prime minister over Mitt Romney any day.”
Claiming that Obama refuses to “accept the false choice between force without diplomacy and diplomacy without force,” the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee gave the current commander in chief credit for an Arab Spring ouster in which the NATO coalition was led largely by France and Britain.
“When a brutal dictator promised to hunt down and kill his own people like rats, President Obama enlisted our allies, built the coalition, shared the burden so that today, without a single American casualty, Muammar Gadhafi is gone and the people of Libya are free,” Kerry said.
He also mocked Romney’s summer trip to London, Israel and Poland, saying that the journey “mystified and alienated our allies.”
“For Mitt Romney an overseas trip was what you call it when you trip all over yourself overseas,” Kerry said. “It wasn’t a goodwill mission. It was a blooper reel.”
“Folks, Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from Alaska. Mitt Romney talks like he’s only seen Russia by watching Rocky IV.”
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