Adoring Obama

One of my goals when I was in America was to talk to people about their impressions of President Barack Obama after 7 months of office.

I must admit, I’m more than a little concerned.

Our dyed-in-the-wool Republican friends say that Obama is deceptive—promising to do one thing, then doing something else entirely—and that anyone who attempts to criticize him is branded a racist.  One pundit quoted by our friends stated that Obama is the greatest B.S. artist ever elected leader of the free world.

Okay, so that’s our dyed-in-the-wool friend.  Still, through his diatribe there may be a glimmer of truth.  Which glimmer that is, I’m not sure, but it got my attention.

The other two individuals I grilled particularly hard about Obama were the Cap’n’s and my fathers.  (My mother is mostly apolitical and my mother-in-law doesn’t care to discuss politics).  Both of our fathers are very devoted supporters of the President, so I hoped to glean a sense of their impressions of him.  Both seemed to think that Obama is a great improvement over his predecessor on the domestic front (a point with which I think it would be difficult to argue).  They are pleased that he is encouraging the auto industry to find ways to curtail the U.S.’s dependency on oil.  They supported the idea of reforming the health care system (though my father still has difficulty divorcing himself from the American insistence on tying health care to employment).  And they say they think he will do good things for re-establishing America’s good standing in the wider world.

This last claim caught my attention, not least because neither father could provide any examples of this in action.  And I’m skeptical of Obama’s efforts in this area based on what he said in his speech in Cairo a few months ago.  Its conciliatory tone I’m sure showed potential for thawing relations between America and the Arab world.  But the conciliatory nature of the speech verged a few times into kowtowing, which I think is not constructive.  Obama stated several times in his speech that it is important to tell the truth in assessing the state of the Middle East, then went on to hold Israel responsible for the statelessness of Arab Palestinians, for the squalor of Gaza, and for the stalemate in negotiations for a Palestinian state.  Oh, and I nearly forgot—mentioned nothing about the millennia-long connection Jews have to this land, instead painting Israel as a state founded on the ashes of the Shoah.  And what did he have to say to the Palestinian Arabs?  Stop the violence.  That’s it.

Truth?  Well, perhaps he told some of it.  Or some version of some of it.  If I were an Arab listening to him, I’d think to myself, “At last—an Arab sympathizer in the White House.  At last—someone who will proclaim to the world the helplessness, haplessness, and hopelessness of the Palestinian people, who have never had so much as a chance at a state.  At last—someone who will sock it to the Israelis, hold them fully responsible for the state the Arab world is in.”  If I were an Arab listening to Obama, I’d have tuned out all the drivel about giving women equal rights (that would be against my cultural values, after all), the call for Palestinians to give up violence (how else can a frustrated people express their rage and anguish?) and the demand that the Arab world recognize Israel (that would be against all my political aspirations and what my Arab education taught me).

I don’t subscribe to some of the beliefs that float around about the Republican party.  I don’t believe George W. Bush was the greatest friend Israel ever had, unless greatness is measured in terms of how long it takes the president to start worrying about his legacy, dreaming of a Nobel Peace Prize, and begin browbeating Israel to make unrequited concessions in the name of Peace.  If that’s the yardstick, then Obama is definitely Israel’s greatest enemy of all time.

I don’t really know anything about Obama that makes me think he’s a bad person.  The Atlantic Ocean is a great buffer zone to filter out the adoration many say he enjoys in the press.  (That, and the fact that I don’t read news reports regularly.)  I believe he understands America’s greatest needs now, and will do what he can to meet them (however much that will be).  And I appreciate that he wishes to improve America’s standing in the world.  George W. Bush’s policy of antagonism and ready epithets did not always reveal a great amount of maturity or thought.

But I am also concerned about what I and many others in my immediate vicinity perceive as a lack of moral compass in Europe, which may be spreading to America.  The headiness of having unloaded a Republican White House and Congress in one fell swoop seems to have some Americans abandoning their accustomed scrutiny of their leadership, and just trusting that he will do the right thing.  My conversations with my father revealed that he is not terribly aware of what Obama is doing in the foreign policy area.  Those with my father-in-law revealed the same.  I’m happy that they have a president they like, but I’m concerned about Americans adoring him so much that they stop paying careful attention to what he does, or fail to criticize him when he misspeaks—or worse, lies—to the world.

I posted a couple of months ago about the speech given by Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, which took issue with Obama’s speech.  I hope others in America are watching Obama as carefully to make sure he does what he says he will do, that he tells the truth as he says he will, and that he is subject to the same level of critique as other politicians.

The Cap’n tells me that the best governments in Israel are usually the conservative ones, because the liberal press act as a watchdog on them, and feel free to criticize them when they foul up.  The opposite—a liberal government—is the worst here, because the editors and publishers of most newspapers and magazines are generally liberal thinkers, and pay less attention to corruption or serious screw-ups on the part of liberal politicians.  David Landau, an editor of HaAretz, styled the most sophisticated newspaper in Israel (i.e. best-written), has said on record that his paper “had ‘wittingly soft-pedalled’ alleged corruption by Israeli political leaders including prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, when, in the opinion of Haaretz, the policies of those leaders were advancing the peace process.”  There you have it, folks, right from the horse’s mouth.

Let’s not let America go down this icky, sticky road.  Any country blessed with freedom of the press should consider it a duty to exercise that freedom.  And any country where people are free to vote for the candidate of their choice should do so with expectations of that candidate.  America is in far too deep a hole in nearly every sense—economically, environmentally, with regard to health care, education, and foreign relations—to entrust their welfare unquestioningly to anyone.

Advertisement