Now it makes sense that Barack Obama is so willing to meet for a nice chat with America’s enemies, should he win the White House.
Now it’s clear why this plausible, even-tempered fellow might think it fruitful to have coffee with frothing anti-Semites such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, raving anti-Americans such as Hugo Chavez or nuclear personality cultists such as Kim Jong-il.
Why wouldn’t he? Barack Obama has spent the last 20 years as part of an admiring coterie surrounding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Nothing any rabidly anti-American dictator has to say could be particularly surprising or offensive to this urbane politician.
On Sundays — not every Sunday, clearly, since Obama apparently missed the famous “God d–n America” sermon — the Democratic candidate has sat in a pew with his family and listened to jeremiads.
If you’re already comfortable hearing a man you esteem roaring about an “arrogant, racist” United States, it’s hardly going to trouble you when other people, with foreign accents, say the same things.
And their faces are so familiar, the Castros and Chavezes! They may come across as cranky, but, for goodness’ sake, who among us isn’t cranky sometimes?
To borrow from Obama, the things they say “may be controversial” to some, their noise, “may seem jarring to the untrained ear.”
Perhaps at heart foreign despots are reasonable men. If President Obama is only given the opportunity to fulfill his campaign promise to “sit down with the leaders of all nations, friend and foe,” maybe we will “make progress” in foreign affairs. Maybe.
But that assumes that our foes share with us a rough idea of what constitutes reality. And they don’t.
In North Korean rhetoric, the United States is an imperialist aggressor, crafty and deceitful; in Hugo Chavez’s words, America “dominates, exploits and pillages the peoples of the world.”
Fidel Castro decries American neofascism; the mullahs of Tehran routinely display banners with the slogan “death to America.”
It would be funny if it weren’t so awful that, to the acclaim of his congregation, Jeremiah Wright called America the “U.S.-of-KKK-A!”, which sounds rather like a rival team to Mahmoud Ahmadinijad’s “Great Satan USA.”
These words and the foul mischaracterizations of our country that they betray are deeply repugnant, whether they’re shouted by an overseas autocrat or a Chicago preacher.
In Obama’s big speech Tuesday, he reminded us that he has “already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy.”
That’s nice, but that it took him a year since declaring his candidacy to distance himself from Wright’s appalling beliefs gives us ground to wonder whether, absent the YouTube fracas, he would ever have bothered — or even noticed.
I’m not suggesting that Obama secretly calls on God to damn America, as did his spiritual mentor, baptiser of his children, blesser of his house and, until recently, adviser to his campaign.
But sitting in that church has evidently blunted Obama’s ability to perceive what most other Americans hear clearly: that vicious anti-Americanism is something to walk away from in disgust, not placidly listen to — or cheer.
Obama is not naive to believe that diplomatic talks can be productive; of course they can. But he is naive if he genuinely believes that “arrogance” is the only reason President Bush has never popped in for tea in Pyongyang or Damascus.
This administration, like others before it, chooses the terms of its engagement and wisely withholds the prestige of bilateral engagement from certain deeply unpleasant regimes.
Perhaps after his years at Reverend Wright’s knee, Obama has come to view anti-American rhetoric as just another quirk of crusty but benevolent old fellows. And perhaps Wright doesn’t really want God to damn America.
Alas, Ahmedinijad and Chavez and their ilk genuinely do.
Examiner Columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
