The successful raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound will be, without a doubt, one of President Obama’s easiest selling points this campaign season. The country’s arch-nemesis, who evaded capture for nearly a decade, shot dead in a high-risk but ultimately casualty-free nighttime sneak-attack in foreign territory? Please. Like an enterprising call girl, this story sells itself.
Which is why Joe Biden is definitely trying way too hard to frame the event in an impressive light. Back in May 2011, just weeks after bin Laden’s death, Biden called the decision to go after the Al Qaeda mastermind “the boldest undertaking any president has undertaken on a single event in modern history.” But over the course of the ensuing ten months, Biden apparently decided that this was understating the case, because at a fund-raiser yesterday, he went even further. “You can go back 500 years,” he said in New Jersey. “You cannot find a more audacious plan.”
By the time the election season is over, Biden will be calling the bin Laden raid the “single most incredible feat performed by a sentient being, here on Earth or throughout the cosmos, at any time in the last 15 billion years.”
