Why wouldn’t he? Why wouldn’t any rogue regime prefer a guy who’s willing to meet with them? The left’s “strength through weakness” foreign policy holds that bad actors actually love hawkish presidents because they make the Great Satan that much easier to demagogue; as such, only by smothering them in hugs can we defuse the anti-American sentiment the Castros of the world use to hold onto power. (To see how that’s working out for Osama, stay tuned later for tonight’s quotes of the day.) The problem with that logic, as Saddam’s next of kin might tell you, is that hawks occasionally mean business, which makes them a risky proposition for any demagogue whose first/only priority is his own survival. That doesn’t mean President Obama couldn’t also be quite dangerous if sufficiently provoked, but that’s my whole point about him vis-a-vis Iran — is there some line, hypothetically, that Iran could cross where he’d feel compelled to act? The unstated premise of the left’s fearmongering about Bush attacking Iran is that a nuclear mullahcracy would actually be preferable to another theater of war in the Middle East. So costly has Iraq been, and so stretched is the military, that they’d actually rather take their chances with deterring Khamenei and company through conventional cold war means than make a run at the reactors and try to destroy their capabilities. What conservatives want and need to hear from Obama isn’t whether he’s willing to meet with Ahmadinejad, which would be repulsive but tolerable if he really did somehow convince Iran to give up their program, but whether he’s prepared to see Iran get the bomb rather than try an attack.

Anyway, Fidel likes him.

Senator Barack Obama’s foreign policy credentials took a further blow on Tuesday after his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination won the backing of Fidel Castro.

The former Cuban president gave a qualified endorsement to Mr Obama whom he described as “the most-advanced candidate” in the race for the White House.

But writing in his regular column in the state-run Granma newspaper, Mr Castro noted that Mr Obama had not dared to call for a reversal of the decades-old US embargo on Cuba.

“Obama’s speech can be translated as a formula for hunger for the country,” the 81-year-old former president wrote, referring to remarks Mr Obama made to the Cuban American National Foundation in Miami last week.

The Illinois senator said he would maintain nearly all trade sanctions against Cuba as leverage to push for democratic change, but also vowed to ease restrictions on US-based exiles travelling to Cuba and sending money to relatives.

If you missed the RNC ad on Friday, watch it now. He’s a lot more malleable on the subject of embargo than Castro makes him sound. Exit question: One more RNC ad pulling quotes from this piece and we’ve got Florida pretty much locked, huh? I told you we didn’t need Crist on the ticket!