This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, February 28th, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown.

Carl Rove and Ed Gillespie Wright in foreign policy that they believe President Obama is vulnerable

and that Republicans can beat him in November by focusing on foreign policy.

Never mind that the president has mostly walked the path laid out by George W Bush.

It's also not clear voters will prioritize foreign policy over the economy when they go to the

polls this year.

Justin Logan, Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, comment.

So Carl Rove and Ed Gillespie, former Chairman of the Republican Party, Carl Rove, of course,

the person who helped create and drive much of the Bush presidency, at least

electorally, make this argument about how to beat President Obama.

They are arguing that whatever Republican candidate emerges should be

Nationalistic, should present himself in a in a confident way

espousing American exceptionalism.

They urge whatever candidate emerges for the fall by Republicans

to play up Obama's aloofness, his inability or perhaps his lack of desire to engage with foreign leaders more directly?

How do you regard this argument that they're making?

Well, I don't regard it well.

They open the piece by saying the conventional wisdom is that this isn't going to be an election about foreign policy,

and insofar as it is an election about foreign policy, the conventional wisdom says that the president is pretty

secure and then they go on to explain in a number of sort of ways why they think

that's wrong but I don't think that they make a convincing argument.

Well what is the specific, what are they trying to grab hold of here with regard to the Obama presidency?

...