Sen. Tom Cotton invokes Dick Cheney, barely mentions Trump
CLEVELAND — Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas may have just given the first speech of the Cotton 2020 campaign for president.
Speaking on the opening night of the Republican convention, the freshman senator talked about the military service of his father and grandfather, and his own tours as an infantryman in Afghanistan and Iraq, attacked President Obama and Hillary Clinton, reached out to independent voters, invoked Dick Cheney and… barely mentioned Donald Trump.
“Help is on the way,” Cotton said, deliberately echoing Cheney’s speech at the 2000 GOP convention.
Cotton made national headlines in 2015, when he wrote a controversial open letter to Iran’s leaders in an apparent effort to kill Obama’s nascent nuclear deal with the so-called Islamic Republic. He has emerged as a insistent critic of the president’s handling of world affairs. Some party insiders thought he might make a good vice presidential candidate as early as 2016.
It wasn’t to be. But Cotton’s speech — a heaping helping of biography, emphasizing military service — suggested that he hasn’t ruled out seeking higher office.
He talked at length about his father’s decision to serve in the military over the objections of his grandfather, also a veteran. He talked about how he left a legal career behind and joined the military himself after 9/11.
“My family isn’t extraordinary; in fact we’re very ordinary,” Cotton told the crowd in Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland. “We don’t fight because we hate our enemies, but because we love our country.”
Cotton said handing the presidency to Hillary Clinton would be “unthinkable.”
The United States deserves “a commander-in-chief who speaks of winning wars and not merely ending wars,” he said. “We’d like a commander in chief who calls the enemy by its name, a commander in chief who draws red lines cautiously, but enforces them ruthlessly. And it would be nice to have a commander in chief who can be trusted to handle classified information.”
His lone reference to the “Trump-Pence” administration was to say that they would be better stewards of national security than Clinton.
Notably, Cotton was the first prime-time speaker at the GOP convention to ask for the support for “the millions of independents and Democrats” who want a strong military, an unusual olive branch on a night thick with red-meat attacks on the current administration and its supporters.
And he took pains to counter a favored Democratic attack: that his opposition to the Iran deal amounted to a call for war with Tehran.
“Believe me, no man wants more war if he’s seen the face of war,” Cotton said.
