When John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan went to Berlin, their rhetoric soared, but their optimism was grounded in the reality of politics, conflict and hard choices. Kennedy didn’t dream of the universal brotherhood of man. He drew lines that reflected hard realities: “There are some who say, in Europe and elsewhere, we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin.” Reagan didn’t call for a kumbaya moment. He cited tough policies that sparked harsh political disagreements —...]]> David Brooks’s column “Playing Innocent Abroad” in today’s New York Times provides a thoughtful analysis of Sen. Obama’s speech yesterday in Berlin. It decomposes Sen. Obama’s lofty rhetoric, placing his remarks in the proper context: reality.

When John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan went to Berlin, their rhetoric soared, but their optimism was grounded in the reality of politics, conflict and hard choices. Kennedy didn’t dream of the universal brotherhood of man. He drew lines that reflected hard realities: “There are some who say, in Europe and elsewhere, we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin.” Reagan didn’t call for a kumbaya moment. He cited tough policies that sparked harsh political disagreements — the deployment of U.S. missiles in response to the Soviet SS-20s — but still worked.

In Berlin, Obama made exactly one point with which it was possible to disagree. In the best paragraph of the speech, Obama called on Germans to send more troops to Afghanistan.

The argument will probably fall on deaf ears. The vast majority of Germans oppose that policy. But at least Obama made an argument.

Much of the rest of the speech fed the illusion that we could solve our problems if only people mystically come together. We should help Israelis and Palestinians unite. We should unite to prevent genocide in Darfur. We should unite so the Iranians won’t develop nukes. Or as Obama put it: “The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.”

The great illusion of the 1990s was that we were entering an era of global convergence in which politics and power didn’t matter. What Obama offered in Berlin flowed right out of this mind-set. This was the end of history on acid.

Since then, autocracies have arisen, the competition for resources has grown fiercer, Russia has clamped down, Iran is on the march. It will take politics and power to address these challenges, the two factors that dare not speak their name in Obama’s lofty peroration.

The odd thing is that Obama doesn’t really think this way. When he gets down to specific cases, he can be hard-headed. Last year, he spoke about his affinity for Reinhold Niebuhr, and their shared awareness that history is tragic and ironic and every political choice is tainted in some way.

But he has grown accustomed to putting on this sort of saccharine show for the rock concert masses, and in Berlin his act jumped the shark. His words drift far from reality, and not only when talking about the Senate Banking Committee. His Berlin Victory Column treacle would have made Niebuhr sick to his stomach.

Obama has benefited from a week of good images. But substantively, optimism without reality isn’t eloquence. It’s just Disney.

There is nothing wrong with hope and optimism. In fact, the greatness of America is rooted largely in the idea that we as citizens of this great country can do anything that we put our minds to. The problem with Sen. Obama’s rhetoric is that it is blind to the realities of the world–namely that there are those, like the president of Iran, who oppose everything America stands for.

]]> http://www.hopeisnotaforeignpolicy.org/2008/07/25/playing-innocent-abroad/feed/ 0 http://www.hopeisnotaforeignpolicy.org/2008/07/19/krauthammers-the-audacity-of-vanity/ http://www.hopeisnotaforeignpolicy.org/2008/07/19/krauthammers-the-audacity-of-vanity/#comments Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:20:55 +0000 Tom Skypek http://hopeisnotaforeignpolicy.org/?p=65 piece--this time on Sen. Obama's pervasive elitist and narcissistic tendencies. Krauthammer, a psychiatrist by trade, paints in interesting portrait of the first-term senator.  Sen. Obama's desire to speak at the Brandenburg Gate is not entirely misguided. Speaking there will undoubtedly evoke images of great statesmen like Ronald Reagan, which could help to bolster his foreign policy credentials.  But Sen. Obama is not Ronald Reagan and a well orchestrated speech at a landmark where great men have made history will do little to enhance Sen. Obama's foreign policy resume.  As Krauthammer notes, speaking at the Brandenburg gate is something to be earned; Obama clearly doesn't understand this:

What Obama does not seem to understand is that the...]]> Charles Krauthammer has written another brilliant piece–this time on Sen. Obama’s pervasive elitist and narcissistic tendencies. Krauthammer, a psychiatrist by trade, paints in interesting portrait of the first-term senator.  Sen. Obama’s desire to speak at the Brandenburg Gate is not entirely misguided. Speaking there will undoubtedly evoke images of great statesmen like Ronald Reagan, which could help to bolster his foreign policy credentials.  But Sen. Obama is not Ronald Reagan and a well orchestrated speech at a landmark where great men have made history will do little to enhance Sen. Obama’s foreign policy resume.  As Krauthammer notes, speaking at the Brandenburg gate is something to be earned; Obama clearly doesn’t understand this:

What Obama does not seem to understand is that the Brandenburg Gate is something you earn. President Reagan earned the right to speak there because his relentless pressure had brought the Soviet empire to its knees and he was demanding its final “tear down this wall” liquidation. When President Kennedy visited the Brandenburg Gate on the day of his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, he was representing a country that was prepared to go to the brink of nuclear war to defend West Berlin.

Who is Obama representing? And what exactly has he done in his lifetime to merit appropriating the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign prop? What was his role in the fight against communism, the liberation of Eastern Europe, the creation of what George Bush 41 — who presided over the fall of the Berlin Wall but modestly declined to go there for a victory lap — called “a Europe whole and free”?

Does Obama not see the incongruity? It’s as if a German pol took a campaign trip to America and demanded the Statue of Liberty as a venue for a campaign speech. (The Germans have now gently nudged Obama into looking at other venues.)

Americans are beginning to notice Obama’s elevated opinion of himself.

There’s nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted “present” nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history — “generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment” — when, among other wonders, “the rise of the oceans began to slow.” As economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, “Moses made the waters recede, but he had help.” Obama apparently works alone.

Obama may think he’s King Canute, but the good king ordered the tides to halt precisely to refute sycophantic aides who suggested that he had such power. Obama has no such modesty.

After all, in the words of his own slogan, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” which, translating the royal “we,” means: “I am the one we’ve been waiting for.” Amazingly, he had a quasi-presidential seal with its own Latin inscription affixed to his podium, until general ridicule — it was pointed out that he was not yet president — induced him to take it down

He lectures us that instead of worrying about immigrants learning English, “you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish” — a language Obama does not speak. He further admonishes us on how “embarrassing” it is that Europeans are multilingual but “we go over to Europe, and all we can say is, ‘merci beaucoup.’” Obama speaks no French.

His fluent English does, however, feature many such admonitions, instructions and improvements. His wife assures us that President Obama will be a stern taskmaster: “Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism … that you come out of your isolation. … Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

For the first few months of the campaign, the question about Obama was: Who is he? The question now is: Who does he think he is?

Krauthammer’s piece raises interesting questions about Sen. Obama.  His losses to Sen. Clinton in Pennsylvania and Ohio are not difficult to understand.  His elitism prohibits him from connecting with much of middle America.  Remember when Obama asked an Iowa crowd what Whole Foods was charging for arugula?  Or when he said this about residents of Pennsylvania:  “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

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