President Obama’s speeches have lacked any recognition of the creative, protective and healing power of freedom. That has bothered me enough.
But something else has been eerily missing, too: humility.
Michael Gerson of The Washington Post put his finger on the problem in his reaction to the president’s Sept. 23 address to the United Nations:
Obama’s rhetorical method in international contexts -- given supreme expression at the United Nations this week -- is a moral dialectic. The thesis: pre-Obama America is a nation of many flaws and failures. The antithesis: The world responds with understandable but misguided prejudice. The synthesis: Me. Me, at all costs; me, in spite of all terrors; me, however long and hard the road may be. How great a world we all should see, if only all were more like…me.
On several occasions, Obama attacked American conduct in simplistic caricatures a European diplomat might employ or applaud. He accused America of acing “unilaterally, without regard for the interests of others” -- a slander against every American ally who has made sacrifices in Iraq and Afghanistan. He argued that, “America has too often been selective in its promotion of democracy” -- which is hardly a challenge for the Obama administration, which has yet to make a priority of promoting democracy or human rights anywhere in the world.
The world, of course, has its problems, too. It has accepted “misperceptions and misinformation.” It can be guilty of a “reflexive anti-Americanism.” “Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world’s problems alone.” Translation: I know you adore me because I am better than America’s flawed past. But don’t just stand there loving me, do something. …
I can recall no other major American speech in which the narcissism of a leader has been quite so pronounced.
A personal destiny. Gerson goes on to say that, because the theme was so self-centered, “no one is likely ever to quote the speech -- except to deride it.”
This is troubling. Even if the president has no messianic pretentions, he does seem to have an adolescent conviction that all the world is mired in a wrongheaded past and he is destined to show us the better path.
I was struck that, in order to boost himself, he could not boost the United States before the United Nations. Under his wise leadership, he said, we’re “ending a war” in Iraq. He couldn’t point out that brave Americans removed a fascist dictator and we’re securing the first Arab democracy in history.
Absent humility. Gerson is right. It’s shocking that such an egomanical speech could go through the long process of interagency review and still come back to Obama with no one suggesting he stop talking about himself and put in a word for the United States.
The problem is correctible. Obama is capable of self-reflection, as he showed to some extent in the Professor Henry Gates-Sergeant James Crowly episode. There, he admitted he inflamed divisions when he said prematurely that the police had “acted stupidly.”
The president has to lighten up about himself. He has to find a humble sense of humor, and he has to stop burying America’s most valuable asset (besides freedom itself), its unrivaled record as engine of progress and liberator of strangers.
No ‘us’ and ‘them.’ I voted for Barack Obama in the hope that Democrats, faced with the responsibility of governing, would shed their cynical illusions and get real about the liberal duty to confront tyranny and help the helpless.
But the cynicism won’t go away if our president continues to look at Democrats and America as “us” and “them.” Or worse, as “me” and “them.”
Frank Warner
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Update: Howard Fineman of Newsweek seems to agree.
And Richard Cohen.
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