Obama’s regret-and-redemption road show
By: Chris Stirewalt
Political Editor
June 4, 2009
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| President Barack Obama shakes hands with Saudi King Abdullah at the start of their bilateral meeting at the king’s farm in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Wednesday. (AP photo) |
If only President Barack Obama would take the same approach on domestic policy that he is taking on foreign affairs.
Whatever happy banalities the president offers in his “address to the Muslim world,” Obama has so far acknowledged by his actions that a youth spent in Indonesia and an African name are not a sturdy basis for setting America’s military and diplomatic course.
On Thursday, Obama will indulge his hubris in Cairo by treating 1.4 billion Muslims to a lecture on American failures, a subject on which most of his intended audience needs no further instruction. He will go on to explain how his own presidency is a repudiation of that checkered past.
Americans have heard some variation of that speech hundreds of times since Obama first strode the cornfields of Iowa. He has even taken his regret-and-redemption road show to Europe twice. Like the dollar, the more Obama talk there is in circulation, the less potency it has.
But where it matters, Obama has seemed content to let those with experience take the lead. Obama has given President George W. Bush’s white knight, Gen. David Petraeus, carte blanche to bring his Iraq strategy to Afghanistan and mold the U.S. officer corps in his own image.
The president has also made retired Marine Gen. Jim Jones not just national security adviser, but also the designated grownup in the West Wing. While everyone else is running around as if they were still on the campaign trail, Jones is there to remind them that there are more important battles to fight than the one with Rush Limbaugh.
Obama has promised to build a stable, democratic nation among the poppy rows of Afghanistan, which even the Bush administration deemed unsuitable to Iraq-style nation building. On the prosecution of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq there is little meaningful difference between the two administrations, except for loftier ambitions.
On matters like rendition, prosecuting Bush figures for mistreating terrorists and military tribunals, Obama has been steadily retreating from his primary election pandering to the Left.
Having seen the virulent, bipartisan disdain for closing the Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison in Cuba and importing its inmates, few serious people expect Obama to follow through on his promises there.
On diplomacy, Obama has been very content to reboot the Clinton administration. The former first lady and her husband’s point man on foreign affairs, Richard Holbrooke, seem to be happily running the show.
On Iran, North Korea, Russia, China and everything else, it has been a very steady return to the Clinton way of doing things. The president quickly forgot the folks he brought in as a candidate for foreign policy support while Hillary Clinton was beating him up for being unprepared.
Two dissident Clintonistas who joined the Obama effort against the first lady early on, Susan Rice and Anthony Lake, are seldom seen. Rice is floundering in Turtle Bay as U.N. ambassador, and Lake is back at Georgetown torturing graduate students with tales from the Bosnian peace talks.
Obama may have won the election, but we have so far gotten the Clintons’ foreign policy and the Bush military.
Whatever you think of the actual policies, it is at least a rare sign of humility from the president. Rather than serving up the half-baked ideas with which Obama bluffed through 2008, he has mostly let the old hands keep the reins.
Not so here at home.
Without any business or administrative experience, the president is gaily tromping through American industry and finance, picking the flowers he likes and stomping the ones he doesn’t fancy.
But even if he wished to lie back as he has on foreign affairs, there is no one on his team who has ever run anything outside of government or academia.
Rahm Emanuel got rich milking businesses through his Clinton connections, but being a no-show board member at Freddie Mac hardly gives you the needed perspective to remake American enterprise.
Grabbing up big chunks of General Motors and Chrysler, nationalizing banks, making companies spend untold billions because he fears global warming, increasing taxes on small businesses, and whipping up new regulations at a furious pace, the president seems untroubled by the fact that all his assumptions are based on the advice of academics and politicians.
So many start up businesses fail because it looks so easy from the outside but is so hard in practice. Obama will soon wish he had kept his day job peddling regret and redemption instead of going into business for himself.
