Israel Matzav

Should Obama be given the benefit of the doubt?

Old friend Richard Cohen seems to be losing patience with the Obumbler.

For instance, it's not clear that Obama is appalled by China's appalling human rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia. He treats the Israelis and their various enemies as pests of equal moral standing. The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much.

This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs? The president himself is no help on this score. When it comes to his own image, he has a tin ear. He hugely misunderstood what some people were saying when they demanded that he get angry over the gulf oil catastrophe and the insult-to-injury statements of BP chief executive Tony Hayward. (Wayward Hayward, he should be called.)

What these people were seeking was not an eruption of anger, not a tantrum and not a full-scale denunciation of an oil company. What they wanted instead was a sign that this catastrophe meant something to Obama, that it was not merely another problem that had crossed his desk -- and this time just wouldn't budge. He showed not the slightest sign in the idiom that really counts in a media age -- body language -- that he gave a damn. He could see your pain, he could talk about your pain, but he gave no indication that he felt it.

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Foreign policy is the realm where a president comes closest to ruling by diktat. By command decision, the war in Afghanistan has been escalated, yet it seems to lack an urgent moral component. It has an apparent end date even though girls may not yet be able to attend school and the Taliban may rule again. In some respects, I agree -- the earlier out of Afghanistan, the better -- but if we are to stay even for a while, it has to be for reasons that have to do with principle. Somewhat the same thing applies to China. It's okay to trade with China. It's okay to hate it, too.

Pragmatism is fine -- as long as it is complicated by regret. But that indispensable wince is precisely what Obama doesn't show. It is not essential that he get angry or cry. It is essential, though, that he show us who he is. As of now, we haven't a clue.

Now Richard is still trying to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, attributing his cold calculations to his broken-home childhood. But the American people rightfully expect their Presidents to emote, to empathize. While policy sometimes needs to be driven by 'real' considerations, there's something about a President who can't find compassion for Iranian protesters being shot in the streets or for Israeli schoolkids living in bunkers under rocket fire that rubs most Americans the wrong way. And rightfully so.

A more cynical view of Obama - far closer to the one that I take - pictures him as a cold, calculating politician who will do anything to get himself ahead. Lawyers come across those personalities all the time. You may think that they're fictitious characters (like in The Paper Chase) but they're not. In my first year law school section (the only year that grades really mattered thirty years ago), there was a group we referred to as the "Gang of Four." Rumor had it that during one assignment, they took all the copies of the materials and hoarded them somewhere in the stacks. They were even rumored to have cut some pages out of the books. One of them - the only one who was actually bright - went on to a Supreme Court clerkship and is a professor today. Can you see Barack Obama behaving the way the "Gang of Four" behaved to get ahead? I can. Does their behavior accord with your sense of fairness?

For those of you who may believe that there's something 'not Jewish' about not giving someone the benefit of the doubt, you're wrong. First, the obligation to give the benefit of the doubt (dan lekaf zchut in Hebrew) only applies to fellow Jews. Second, it only applies to people about whom you either have no basis for forming an opinion or who generally do the right thing. Barack Obama isn't entitled to it.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:23 PM