Obama fans really have it out for their candidate.  Many of them seem bent on casting his candidacy in terms that are simultaneously politically dangerous for him in the election and profoundly insulting to approximately 4-5 billion people around the world.  Here is Igal Moria (via Sullivan):

Put yourself in the shoes of a youngster in Africa, Iraq or Indonesia: can you imagine what effect it would have to see the non-white face of Obama –of Barack Hussein Obama – as the figurehead of the United States? Do you know how vital it would be for the psychology of youngsters in the developing world to be infected by the relentless positivity that Obama exudes?

Once again, an Obama fan can shout Obama’s full name from the rooftops and make wild claims about the efficacy of his face to restore American reputation around the world.  Obviously, that view doesn’t contain anything condescending or insulting about foreigners or about Obama, because it is said in a complimentary tone. 

Here’s Moria again:

But I believe that what is good for Israel is a US president who is good for the world. A US president with whom the Palestinian boys would identify [bold mine-DL] would make Israel, and the whole world, more secure. It would inspire people everywhere to embrace what America represents – modernity, freedom, civil society, and democracy.

In light of the latest hubbub on the right over Obama’s church and its newsletter, I cannot imagine a message that Obama wants voters to hear less than the claim that Palestinian boys would identify with him.  Perhaps Mr. Moria isn’t aware that American public opinion on Israel and Palestine is skewed very heavily against the Palestinians, but if he is aware he has to be a little bit crazy to say this.  He already has had enough trouble persuading voters that he really is just as “pro-Israel” as his record would suggest, and he will already have to jump through a great many hoops to demonstrate this.  Do his fans want him to have to jump through still more?    

Now, you might ask first of all: why on earth would these Palestinian boys identify with him?  I don’t think they would, because they would understand, or would be told quickly enough, that he essentially holds the current administration’s position on Israel and Palestine.  If there is an assumption that he somehow represents any kind of break with the status quo on Israel, I don’t think it is founded on anything he has said or done since being in the Senate.  It is founded on a fairly dubious and, when you think about it, fairly condescending view that says that Arabs and many other people around the world are going to see Obama as being somehow like them, which will in turn change their attitude about America, as if their sentiments about the United States were founded in nothing more than a passing dislike because they weren’t attracted to the look of previous Presidents.  This assumes that foreign publics are extremely superficial in their judgements, and it reinforces the idea that, but for American efforts, people around the world would not embrace “modernity, freedom, civil society, and democracy.”  Some may embrace them, some may not, but what Americans and Westerners generally have to get out of their heads is the idea that the embrace or rejection of these things has much to do with us or how we present ourselves in the world.  Certainly, ham-fisted efforts to export these things with the sword will cause more resistance than there would otherwise be, but typically the peoples who want these things will go about pursuing them to one degree or another and those who see them as antithetical to their way of life or traditions or religion would resist them regardless.   

This is a huge assumption that Obama fans often make about the man’s potential to change foreign perceptions of America, which seems to require that you believe that foreign perceptions of America are driven almost entirely by superficial and symbolic things and that the problem with America’s reputation is not what our government has done in our name but rather with the packaging of America.  This is the Bush administration’s argument that the problem is not content, but marketing, not policy, but “getting the message out” that we are all swell and friendly.  Obama’s virtue, then, is that he will show the world that Americans are actually swell and friendly, so they will immediately drop whatever objections they may have to the (as they see it) baneful cultural influences of Americanisation or the forcible export of democracy or U.S. hegemony in their region.  This is crazy.  Mr. Bush gave us Karen Hughes to run a public relations campaign in lieu of real public diplomacy; the Obama fans present Obama as a more appealing Karen Hughes.