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Change Has Come, But It Is Not Coming

My apologies for not having had more to say on Election Night itself.  First, congratulations to the new President-elect are in order.  Throughout the campaign, I kept imagining reasons why he would not be able to do this, and at every turn he kept proving me and so very many others wrong.  He mobilized and organized his […]

My apologies for not having had more to say on Election Night itself.  First, congratulations to the new President-elect are in order.  Throughout the campaign, I kept imagining reasons why he would not be able to do this, and at every turn he kept proving me and so very many others wrong.  He mobilized and organized his own grassroots movement, fought the entrenched establishment candidate and party machine and prevailed, and in what he was able to achieve there are lessons for disaffected conservatives.  It was interesting to watch the video of Obama giving his victory speech in Grant Park, which I have driven by and walked through so many times over the last seven years, and to behold an unprecedented event there in such familiar surroundings.  Here in Hyde Park there was some celebratory honking and shouting the name Obama, but the neighborhood was on the whole very quiet (probably a lot of people were at the speech). 

My Culture11 article on what we can expect from the future President makes an argument that will be familiar to many regular readers of Eunomia, stressing as it does Obama’s aversion to political risk, his careful, deliberative approach and his preference for consensus and accommodation.  This is my concession to Obama supporters’ emphasis on the man’s temperament, which I think the article explains fairly well, albeit not necessarily in the most flattering way.  I set this view of Obama against the interpretations of those inclined to hope for or fear significant policy shifts in the years to come.  One point that I want to emphasize is this:

There is an assumption shared by most Obama backers that he will prove to be, in Colin Powell’s formulation, a “transformational” President, particularly with respect to foreign affairs and America’s reputation abroad. But the expected transformation in foreign attitudes seems based largely on temporary foreign enthusiasm for Obama’s candidacy that is itself a product of the misconception that Obama’s election will mark some significant or meaningful change in U.S. foreign policy [bold added-DL].

As if on cue, Garry Kasparov offers this comment today:

Bush is practically a bouquet of the classic American stereotypes, the ones so easy to hate: rich, inarticulate, uninterested in the world, stridently religious and hasty to act. (And the images of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina seemingly exemplified the stereotype of Americans as racists and were viewed largely without surprise abroad. Of course they wouldn’t rescue poor black people.) Obama would explode these stereotypes.  But the world’s multitude of grievances against the Bush administration quickly would be laid on Obama’s doorstep if he were to fail to back up his inspiring rhetoric with decisive action. 

Kasparov then goes on to make a predictable argument that Obama will be betraying his promise if he does not share Kasparov’s preoccupation in vilifying the Russian government.  That is, according to Kasparov the dramatic improvement in foreign attitudes toward the United States that many Obama supporters expect will be contingent on his ability to introduce changes to U.S. policy that are satisfactory to a great variety of foreign audiences and the American public in a very short period of time after entering office, and if he cannot do this the international hostility towards his administration will be just just about as great as it has been towards Mr. Bush’s.  This is to set Obama up for failure.  Kasparov may not care about this, but what is remarkable is how much his domestic supporters have also put Obama’s “transformational” potential in the hands of other nations.  Having accepted the premise that Obama’s election will repair our reputation and image abroad, they open him up to the charge that he has failed when other nations continue to respond to U.S. policy with the same skeptical or hostile attitudes, even though they are responding to the policy and not to the man. 

P.S.  Wolfgang Ischinger, former German ambassador to the United States, sounds the warning against excessive European expectations:

I do worry that many Germans and other Europeans have developed unrealistically high expectations for an Obama administration. In some of the panels I’ve been participating in recently, you get the sense that everyone expects a trans-Atlantic paradise will emerge with blue skies and constant sunshine. Some disappointment is inevitable.

 

We know that on many issues there is an obvious, visible divergence of interests across the Atlantic. Europeans will be surprised, for instance, to learn that even with Obama in the White House and a strong Democratic majority in the US Senate, the US is unlikely to ratify the Kyoto protocol or its successor arrangements as they currently exist.

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