Israel Matzav

The path not taken

Victor Davis Hanson imagines what would have happened during the last six months if President Obama had decided to govern like a Clintonesque moderate rather than like a Jimmy Carter drunk on socialism. I'm only going to highlight the parts that relate to Israel - you may want to read the whole thing (Hat Tip: Instapundit).

4) No apologies. When abroad, Obama makes few apologies. He promises to listen anew, even suggests that there is a new era in American diplomacy—but eschews all the ‘reset’ button jargon. He never mentions all the past tropes about Native Americans, the atomic bomb, colonialism, racism, insensitivity to Muslims, and all the other ways in which he has apologized for an apparently embarrassing America—convinced that unapologetic Russians, Chinese, Germans, Japanese, and others have far more to atone for than does his own country. Instead, in his first six months we hear of things like Shiloh, Guadalcanal, Midway, Inchon, Chosin, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright Brothers, and lions like Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman, in addition to his de rigueur citations of slavery, racism, sexism, class strife and all the other sins of America.

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10) Allies. Obama is immune to third-world romance and sees nothing but thuggery in the Castros, Chavezes, Ortegas, and Ahmadinejads of the world. He is to the left of Bush, but understands that a Uribe, Maliki, and Netanyahu are closer to American values than the alternatives. As a liberal, he talks of empathy with those who support democracy in Iran, Iraq, and central America, and is an advocate for human rights without ambiguity.

I say all of the above not because it is at all believable, but only because that had he taken such a path he would have continued to mesmerize the country. In contrast, most of us (but not all) realized that the above is completely ridiculous and the real story is the rush to neo-socialism either to beat the impending popular backlash or in hopes of a massive-deficit-driven inflationary upsurge that gives us a year of recovery before the tab of stagflation comes due.

In 1968 a divided country elected Nixon “to bring us together” in the mistaken notion that he was a Reaganesque conservative rather than a vindictive partisan. So too forty years later, mutatis mutandis, the country wanted to go a notch left, and ended up instead with a European socialist nursed in the politics of Chicago—and like Nixon, unless he changes, doomed to implode.

I hope that Obama's implosion will at least not result in another divisive character following him. For those who have forgotten, after Nixon's forced resignation in the middle of his second term, we got the ineffective Gerald Ford followed by Obama's role model, the dogmatic but dangerous Jimmy Carter. I'd hate to see the backlash generated by Obama result in a Pat Buchanan type becoming President of the United States. Let's hope that Obama doesn't do too much more damage and goes quietly into the sunset on January 20, 2013 (I'm not betting on the first part of that sentence, and I'm no more than 50-50 on the second part).

And I hope that Israel doesn't think it needs Obama when and if it decides to go to war over the next three and a half years.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:24 AM