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Opinion
Obama’s Hope: Genuine or Not?
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Muslim women look at an image of President Barack Obama in Jakarta. (Reuters) |
Soon after the speeches are given and the confetti is swept, America’s first African American President will be charged with the almost insuperable task of dampening expectations.
One of the enduring pieces of advice to politicians from political spin doctors is to “under-promise and over-deliver” — to cheapen or devalue public expectations, and then to surprise the electorate with meaningful, substantive legislative reforms. At the outset, it appears that President-elect Obama has turned this equation on its head: in an election that lasted more than two years, he has by all accounts radically over-promised, itself a sure recipe for political letdown.
"The Chosen One's Speeches"
| The American Muslim community in particular, have seen this episode before... |
During the campaign, David Brooks, New York Times columnist extraordinaire, humorously referred to this phenomenon as “Obama Comedown Syndrome,” or OCS in short. “The Chosen One’s speeches had seemed to [Obama followers] less like stretches of words and more like soul sensations that transcended time and space,” he wrote in a February 2008 column. Obama followers, in the words of Brooks, would quickly lose their supply of hope-amine, “the brain chemical that fuels euphoric sensations of historic change and personal salvation.”
To be sure, the American public, and the American Muslim community in particular, have seen this episode before. I have clear memories, in fact, of an inaugural address given not so long ago wherein an American President stood before the world and articulated a “new chapter” in American foreign policy:
“Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world. All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.”
The address was widely celebrated: Richard Norton Smith, a well-known presidential historian, noted that it was a “speech that Woodrow Wilson could have given.” Allan Lichtman, another noted presidential historian, said that it was “one of the most ringing endorsements of American intervention in American history.” And who might be the cherished deliverer of such audible prose? The most unpopular President in recent history, of course: George W. Bush in 2004.
After delivering this highly ambitious second inaugural address, the outgoing President instead proceeded with a high-priority, six-month campaign for legislative changes on the driest bit of public policy in America: social security reform.
The Muslim Community and an “Obama-myopia”
Wide-eyed optimists in the Muslim community — especially the growing contingent of Muslim democracy activists — were clearly let down. This was most visibly evidenced just twelve months after the President assumed his second term in office, when the State Department’s response to the election of Hamas in the Gaza Strip was to deny their legitimacy as a governing body and to withhold the foreign aid that would help that democratically elected body to thrive.
The question now is whether American Muslims will together again bear witness to that all but certain exhortation of “Obama-myopia”. There are a few answers.
It suffices, first of all, to acknowledge the weight of the moment. And it is, in fact, a testament to the integrity of the American people that, when a staggering 40 percent believe that Muslims should be forced to carry special government-issued ID cards, they would still, in the words of a New Yorker magazine writer, entrust their confidence in “a person whose first name is a Swahili word derived from the Arabic (it means “blessing”), whose middle name is that not only of a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad but also of the original target of an ongoing American war, and whose last name rhymes nicely with ‘Osama.’” You can bet (without money, of course) that this greatest of political ironies is certainly not lost on the American Muslim community.
| Those who were driven to vote for President-elect Obama are probably bound to be disappointed. |
There is no doubt as well that the President-elect is, perhaps moreso than a majority of first-generation American Muslims, keenly aware of his ethnic and even Muslim lineage. The optimists among the Muslim community — those who hesitatingly bought into the message of hope and change — which includes a staggering 80 percent of Muslim voters according to the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, were in some cases convinced that the President-elect’s background was reason enough to cast their ballots for him.
On the contrary, it should not strike political historians as surprising that many Muslim voters were driven by a greater attachment to domestic issues than to foreign policy issues or an abiding connection with the President-elect’s intriguing family history.
These American Muslims, after all, are just as concerned as any other consumer with the declining US economy, access to affordable health care, and the searing, unashamed exploitation of the environment.
Expecting Disappointments
Those who were driven to vote for President-elect Obama on the basis of his professed “fresh approach” to foreign policy, however, are probably bound to be disappointed. “Remember that the idea of improving the image of the United States in the Muslim world was also a priority for the Bush administration,” says Richard Bulliet, professor of history at Columbia University in New York. Bulliet sees Washington, DC as more of an “attitude” than a capital city proper.
“Washington is, for the most part, locked into certain fixations: the fixation that Iran is an ultimate enemy that cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, the fixation that Israel is always the injured party in violent exchanges, the fixation that so-called moderate governments, by which they mean pro-American, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are always our friends and will act in our interest.”
| "The $3 billion in aid to Israel isn’t going to get touched under any administration—that is, unless they decide to give it more." |
These “fixations” — what Palestinian-American Professor Rashid Khalidi and a former colleague of Obama refers to as the “stranglehold of conventional wisdom” in Washington — are so deeply embedded in the political system, whether in congressional votes or in the make-up of think tanks and congressional staff appointments, that changing the official policy line in any of these areas would be extremely difficult.
Cenk Uyghur, the lead host of a liberal talk radio show called The Young Turks, cautions Democratic supporters not to expect any miracles. On the question of financial aid to Israel, for example, Uyghur notes, “I would be shocked if they cut a nickel out of it, ever, for a Democrat or a Republican. The $3 billion in aid to Israel isn’t going to get touched under any administration — that is, unless they decide to give it more.”
What we may see instead, says Bulliet, is a more nuanced articulation of the ‘War on Terror.’ He predicts, in fact, that the ‘War on Terror’ idiom will itself be retired — and along with it, he predicts, the invidious effort to define it.
But is that it? Maybe not, says Khalidi. What distinguishes President-elect Obama from other successful candidates for President is the fact that, during the campaign, he himself was forced to confront, on daily basis, the stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs — to wit, all of it directed at him. Perhaps, it is hoped, he has emerged from the two-year battle for President with a renewed sense of the need to break free from the agents of Washington status quo delinquency.
“Obama’s hype comes from exaggerating his powers and his virtues, not faking them,” says Brooks. If anything, the American Muslim community desperately needs to acknowledge that their position in this, the atmosphere of change must be earned, not fed. There is yet much work to be done.
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Omar Soliman is a political consultant and writer. He graduated from the Columbia University School of Journalism in New York and has published in the Globe and Mail, the Hill Times, and CBC News Online, among other outlets. He was a Frank Mankiewicz Scholar in Politics and an Edgar & Arthur Nathan Memorial Scholar.
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