What’s different in Obama is that he seems to understand much more realistically how fragile American’s soft power is, and how it has to be played very modestly and prudently. In fact, by playing it modestly and prudently, he seems to actually be increasing our influence. It’s an example of less being more. The Iranian protesters seem to be more inspired by his acknowledgement of America’s past sins in Iran, and his non-interventionist stance, than they would by, say, a McCain Presidency that aggressively “supported” the protesters with bombastic speeches, moralistic preening, and pointless threats.

In other words, many of these people want to subtly emulate Obama. They see the US taking a new tack, and it helps them see that they can do something similar. They can see the US being less interventionist, and more reasonable, and they want a similar kind of leadership themselves. It’s very clear that things in Iran have swung in a dramatic way since around the time of Obama’s Cairo speech. Which is the cause, and which the effect, isn’t entirely possible to say. It’s more that there’s a kind of shift in the world going on, that you are in danger of missing, by being overly skeptical of exagerrated claims. Just as, during the election cycle, you were highly skeptical of claims that Obama would be different in foreign policy from McCain or the usual American jingoism. I remember at the time telling you that you would be pleasantly surprised by Obama’s foriegn policy, and even you seem to glad to admit that now, given how much praise you’ve heaped on him during recent weeks. Well, if even you are pleasantly surprised by Obama, how do you think the rest of the world is feeling? Those who were less skeptical than you are feeling even more reassured, and that kind of reassurance has real meaning in the world of diplomacy and the intangibles of international moods.

One can certain exagerate the importance of such things, but one can also underestimate their value as well. Pretending that, because foreign elections don’t much matter to the US, that US elections don’t much matter to the rest of the world, simply ignores the reality of how influential the US is in the world, and how much attention gets paid to American politics, particularly our President. If McCain were President, I guarantee it would have a strong polarizing effect on the world, and his rhetoric would undermine our interests. Obama is no savior, but he represents, symbolically and literally, a change in the way the US wants to relate to the world, to its former enemies and rivals, and this gets noticed. It frees up a certain degree of energy and attention in the world which was previously dedicated to demonizing the US, and lets it produce more moderating and reformist effects within nations that had previously been so devoted to opposing the US. Obama is a hard figure for many of these people to oppose, so instead, their opposition gets turned inward, towards those in their own societies who have held those societies back.

And, as you said repeatedly during the American election cycle, Obama’s overall effect, at least in the short term, is to heighten many of these polarities. We can see this occuring in Iran as well, as the old hard-liners get harder, but they also get more obviously crazy and identifiable as nut jobs. The GOP has become discredited in the process of overreacting to Obama, and so has the Iranian theocracy become more and more discredited in overreacting to the reformists and protesters there.

Why does Mousavi call himself the Iranian Obama if it has no meaning within his own country? Obviously it does. People in Iran are aware of Obama, and are pleased with the restraint they see in him. So even Mousavi wants to capitalize on that by positioning himself in Obama’s camp, even if in the purely political sense it’s absurd. There’s another, even more important sense in which its true, and people resonate in that way, not simply on the basis of overt policies and ideologies.

That being said, I think your critique still mostly stands. This is rather convincing, for one:

A good way to test the silliness of a statement is to think about how reasonable it would sound if it were being made by your opponents against your preferred politician or in favor of one of their leaders.

It is dangerous to impute too much good or ill on the actions or non-actions of the U.S. political leadership.