President Barack Obama is "insulting" the American people by trying to play down threats posed by terrorists and other crises overseas, National Journal commentator Ron Fournier says.
Fournier said Tuesday that Obama should "explain very honestly to the public what it is he's doing, and at least look like he's taking this seriously," The
Daily Caller reported.
"In this kind of situation, optics are important. It's not just your sense of communicating to the public how grave this is, but also the messages you're sending to our enemies," Fournier said in an interview with MSNBC's "The Cycle," The Daily Caller reported.
BuzzFeed reported that at a fundraiser last Friday in Purchase, N.Y., Obama told donors: "The truth of the matter is, is that the world has always been messy. In part, we're just noticing now because of social media and our capacity to see in intimate detail the hardships that people are going through."
He couldn't have been more misleading, Fournier said.
"What you don't say is, 'Oh, you know what? The world is safer than it was 20 years ago. The only difference is now that people have social media, and they can see how horrible the world is,'" Fournier said.
"Frankly, that's insulting to the American public. We knew before social media how scary the world is, and we know that in a lot of ways it's scarier now — and that's not just because of social media. Hey, Mr. President, there was media before there was social media."
Fournier said the president needs to "treat the threat, rhetorically, as seriously as I presume he's treating it in the situation room."
Counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke echoed that view in comments to
ABC News, calling Obama "wrong" to play down the dangers facing the United States.
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"We're much more capable of defending ourselves now," says Clarke, who served under both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as a counterterrorism adviser.
"We have the Department of Homeland Security, we have a lot of resources going into counterterrorism, but the threat has also increased, and I think the threat has probably increased more than the defenses."
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