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July 23, 2008
Model-O
Some oddities in Obama’s positions.
by Victor Davis Hanson
NRO’s The Corner
On 9/11: Cosmic Justice?
Obama's latest — "Osama bin Laden and his top leadership — the people who murdered 3,000 Americans — have a safe haven in north-west Pakistan, where they operate with such freedom of action that they can still put out hate-filled audio tapes to the outside world. That's the result of the Bush-McCain approach to the war on terrorism."
So spoke Obama. But would he please spell out exactly what he would do instead of the "Bush-McCain approach" to get bin Laden out of Waziristan, and how he would go beyond our present Predator strikes and stealthy incursions? In the past he has advocated open incursions into Pakistan ("The first step must be to get off the wrong battlefield in Iraq and take the fight to the terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan." / "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."); does he still advocate that?
Unmentioned is that in 1998 (during the golden Clintonian years of diplomacy) Pakistan went nuclear. That fact and its fragile governments might explain why bin Laden hasn't been bombed or taken through an overt American invasion. And when Obama says "We would make a decision to bring the full weight of not only U.S. justice but world justice down on him" I hope he's not thinking of something like the Milosevic experience, in which the mass murderer died unconvicted after four years of captivity and an OJ-like circus at the World Court at The Hague.
On His Wife: The Glamour Magazine Interview
Ipse dixit:
It's infuriating, but it's not surprising, because let's face it: What happened was that the conservative press — Fox News and the National Review and columnists of every ilk—went fairly deliberately at her in a pretty systematic way...and treated her as the candidate in a way that you just rarely see the Democrats try to do against Republicans.
But this is disingenuous. First, Ms. Obama is the recipient of almost continuously positive attention and press coverage in the network news. In CNN's comparative profiles of the candidates, it dwelt on her accomplishments, while focusing on Ms. McCain's problems with prescription drugs, her privileged status, the circumstances of her meeting John McCain, etc.
Second, Ms. Obama, not on the prompt of the National Review, chose to play a highly partisan role, and, furthermore, publicly to indict American culture and life on the basis of her newfound prominence and exposure as a wife of a candidate, all in a way none of the other spouses of candidates in either party did with the exception of Bill Clinton — who not surprisingly was equally cross-examined.
Most observers, after all, will take offense when told by a potential First Lady that their country heretofore is not the sort of place to inspire pride, or is downright mean, or its people usually "uninvolved and uninformed". Most of us either did not know of Michelle Obama, or, to the extent we did, had a favorable opinion of her as a successful wife, mother, and highly educated and experienced career professional — until in a series of "raise the bar" sermons, she let loose a barrage of indictments against American culture.
Once again the pattern proves the same: the Obamas spontaneously offer biting fundamental critiques on the unsoundness of American life and culture, from the important to the silly — whether our national temperament, or our supposed inability to speak a foreign language, or our diet, etc — and then the Senator recoils in anguish and hurt when any of the targets suggests that they are both wrong in their indictments and not especially the sort who can make the case America has been mean or unfair to its citizens.
It is the duty of all journalists to call Obama on his double-standard on every occasion he draws upon it, since we are seeing a dangerous messianic quality in which anything short of the accustomed adoration becomes "infuriating" and a sort of exemption from cross-examination on an always expanding array of topics is demanded.
On Wisdom: the Obama Paradox
The more a coy Obama speaks to enthusiastic crowds and gives soundbites and photo-ops to slavish reporters, the more everyone wants more of a piece of him, especially in interviews and press conferences.
But the more he dispenses his impromptu wisdom, the more he sounds like, well, a rookie senator whose collective experience derives from the utopianism of The Harvard Law Review, the gravy-train of Chicago entitlement politics, and the world view of Trinity Church.
Yet, the more his handlers treat him like fossilized amber, the less experience he gains, guaranteeing that on almost every rare ex tempore moment he will suggest something that doesn't compute — that he might be president for 10 years, or that we need a civilian version of the Pentagon with the same $500 billion annual budget, or that someone like a Centcom commander like Petraeus doesn't have his strategic comprehensive view, or that the Anbar awakening and the Surge were not, at least in part, connected (as if the signal that we were not pulling out, [as Obama advocated] or that we were changing tactics to ensure the safety of those in the neighborhoods who would help us, did not reassure tired Sunnis to join with us in expelling al Qaeda.)
For someone who has made the case that Bush in general is responsible for everything from the mortgage to energy crises, it's jarring to hear such particularism and contextualization about the surge's irrelevance.
©2008 Victor Davis Hanson