It’s not just coming from Republicans (for example, Dick Cheney’s accusation that Mr. Obama is trying to pretend that the country isn’t at war). Now barbs are coming from the center too. This week’s Foreign Policy magazine has a provocative cover: Mr. Obama next to Jimmy Carter with — gasp — an “equals” sign in the middle. New York Times/CBS polling shows that public approval of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy dropped 9 points to 50 percent between last April and November. Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on the Daily Beast blog two weeks ago that Mr. Obama needs to toughen up with his adversaries. “He puts far too much store on being the smartest guy in the room,” Mr. Gelb wrote. “He’d do well to remember that Jimmy Carter also rang all the I.Q. bells.”  So soon? Here is a president who just ramped up the war in Afghanistan, sending an additional 30,000 American troops. He has stepped up drone strikes by unmanned Predators in Pakistan and provided intelligence and firepower for two airstrikes against Al Qaeda in Yemen that killed more than 60 militants. He has resisted the temptation to sign a new nuclear arms agreement with Russia that might not provide American inspectors with the level of verification detail that they want. He is moving toward the wide use of full body scans in American airports. On Thursday, in an oblique nod to the Cheney criticism, he even used the phrase “we are at war,” in describing the fight against Al Qaeda.  Of course, accusations that Democrats are genetically softer on threats to the Republic are nothing new. After World War II, Republicans mostly stopped attacking the Democrats as the party that had gotten America into two world wars, and began calling it soft on Communism. Roosevelt’s agreement to the postwar division of Europe at Yalta, followed by China’s fall in 1949 while Truman was president, spurred that on. John Kennedy managed to emerge from an early fiasco at the Bay of Pigs and achieve the counter-image of a cold war liberal, thanks to the Berlin and Cuban-missile crises; then Lyndon Johnson’s fear of being labeled “soft on Communism” helped him override his doubts about getting deeper into Vietnam. But after that, the ill-fated antiwar candidacy of George McGovern, followed by Jimmy Carter’s inability to rescue American hostages in Iran, sealed a stereotype of Democrats as, well, wimps.  And labels count, as a poll taken last August by the Pew Center for the People and the Press illustrates: When voters were asked which party could do a better job of dealing with terrorism, they expressed more confidence in Republicans than in Democrats, as they had consistently since 2002. The 2009 margin was 38 percent to 32 percent. But when asked which party could do a better job of making wise decisions about foreign policy, 44 percent chose the Democrats, 31 percent the Republicans.  Some experts say that the weakling label is more about this city than Mr. Obama — that every political cycle brings with it the opportunity for pundits and politicians to try to prove they were right all along. “I think the problem is much less Obama than the audience,” said George Perkovich, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “This is about talk radio and punditry; these are the absolutes that the bloggers deal with: wimp or macho? This is the new caricature, but it doesn’t withstand any analysis.”  But labels can stick, as Mr. Carter himself found out so well, and as the Republicans also know from their experience parrying the opposite stereotype — of cowboy-style recklessness, first under Ronald Reagan and later under George W. Bush (whose own father, oddly, was said to have suffered from a “wimp factor”).  All of which raises the question of what, exactly, it is that Mr. Obama has to do by the end of the year to turn around the impression that Democrats are cream puffs on foreign policy.  For the White House, 2009 was a year of emphasizing a departure from the blunter foreign policy style of President Bush, of projecting that America could offer an unclenched fist (Iran), push the reset button (Russia) and proclaim that it was moving to a policy that focused not only on guns but also offered butter (Pakistan).  But now, 2010 “will be about achieving some results there,” said Brian Katulis, a national security expert at the Center for American Progress and a Democrat. “They’re going to need to demonstrate a set of tangible successes that’s not just a set of speeches.”  Those tangible successes include being able to show that the nice-guy act can yield real results.  Take Russia, for instance. Mr. Obama needs Russia’s agreement to impose stiffer United Nations Security Council sanctions against Iran this year, to make worthwhile the 12 months he just spent courting President Dimitri Medvedev.  In 2009, Mr. Obama pledged a new relationship with Russia after several years during which the Bush administration and the Kremlin were at each other’s throats over everything from missile defense to Georgia. Mr. Obama removed the thorniest dispute between the two countries when he announced last September that he would scrap plans for missile defense system sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, a central irritant to Russia, in favor of smaller ship-based interceptors that might later be positioned on land in Europe. Russia welcomed the move, with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin going so far as to call it “correct and brave.”  Now it’s time for some payback. The United States wants the Security Council to endorse tough new sanctions against Iran as part of the international effort to rein in Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Russia and China don’t like sanctions, and both have dragged their feet before.  So far, Mr. Obama has gotten Mr. Medvedev — but not China’s president, Hu Jintao — to say publicly that he might be willing to endorse new sanctions. But will Russia and China come through when the time arrives?  “The biggest vulnerability that he’s got is that he said all that stuff about engagement and the outstretched hand, that he looks naïve if he discovers that other people don’t reciprocate,” said Stephen Sestanovich, Clinton administration ambassador-at-large to the former Soviet Union who is now at the Council on Foreign Relations. But, he added: “The Chinese and the Russians are more likely to try to let him down easy, to smooth over the disagreement. They like the good relationship they’ve got now, and there’s no payoff for them in trying to humiliate him.”  And, speaking of Iran, this is the year when Mr. Obama must go from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde with that country, the experts say. Nobody thinks there’s much chance that the Iranian government will suddenly suspend its enrichment of uranium, as Mr. Obama would like. But Mr. Perkovich argues that Mr. Obama has done much to unhinge the government there, by giving the opposition in Iran more of a reason to view the United States with a kinder eye, thanks to Mr. Obama’s overtures over the past year. Still, since the president can’t depend on the Iranian opposition toppling the government, 2010 is the year he must show he is standing tough to try to contain Iran. Which means harsher Security Council sanctions.  Then there’s terrorism. Mr. Obama will also have to demonstrate some tangible action there, the experts say, to dispel the notion put forward by the Republicans that his plans to shut down the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, makes Americans less safe. The Christmas Day attempted plane attack over Detroit failed in many ways, but it succeeded in doing one thing: reintroducing the issue of terrorism into the American psyche. Now, Mr. Obama is under pressure to show that he considers fighting terrorism to be a priority.  The problem though, is that many of the steps he can take against terrorism — like intelligence co-operation, drone strikes and covert actions — are, by their very nature, often invisible. “He needs visible victories there, like hits on Al Qaeda leaders, so no one is able to put together a narrative that says he’s weak,” said David J. Rothkopf, a Clinton administration official and author of “Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power.”  For Mr. Obama, that may also mean talking tough more often, Mr. Rothkopf said. “If you’re going to be president of the United States in the early part of the 21st century, you’re going to have to look like you’re tough on terror.”
Opponents love to cast Democrats as weak, and labels stick. What it might take for the president to look strong.