What's that sound?

Pajamas Media's Jennifer Rubin has her ear to the ground and says if you listen carefully, you can already hear the 2012 campaign underway:

Last week, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney appeared at the Foreign Policy Initiative conference to lay out their case against the president’s approach to foreign policy and align themselves with a forward-leaning, free-trading, and American values-based foreign policy vision. Tim Pawlenty has been throwing some shots at Romney over his Massachusetts health care plan (Romney hasn’t bothered to respond) and Mike Huckabee is everywhere — in Israel and on Fox News most visibly. Sarah Palin pushed “death panels” into the public debate, both horrifying her opponents and cementing the attachment of her fans. And in Hong Kong she too talked foreign policy last week, taking issue with the president’s defense cuts and emphasizing the importance of free trade and human rights as part of America’s international agenda.

According to Rubin, there are four themes that the more likely GOP challengers are working from:

1. Obama's lack of executive leadership experience has become all too obvious.
2. Obama is no moderate, but rather the far left radical Sarah Palin told us he was.
3. Obama now owns the economy, complete with its alarming debt and unemployment.
4. Obama's foreign policy, which belittles America, is a failure.

That last point, Rubin says, will be hammered home by the Republicans as they offer an optimistic vision for the nation and its future:

Each in his or her own way will sound Reagan-esque themes as Palin did in her Hong Kong speech: restore America’s defense budget (which Obama is determined to take down to 3% of GDP), go forward with full funding for missile defense, counter Russian aggression, and defend human rights and democracy against despots. Obama thinks American exceptionalism is cringe-inducing chauvinism; Republicans know it to be the foundation of a successful foreign policy.

Rubin doesn't expect any GOP candidate to announce for 2012 until the 2010 congressional races are behind us and and all their implications of their results have been thoroughly analyzed. But the four campaign themes she citied all come under the same general heading -- this is not the “change” most American voters had in mind when they marked their ballots for Obama.

- JP