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The magician’s performance has failed

by Mojambo ( 95 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Healthcare, History, Politics, Progressives at November 18th, 2013 - 7:00 am

I think it is interesting that Valerie Jarrett has said that Obama is a man who has been bored all his life. The inertia of government is not want interests him, he wants to be above it all.

by Fouad Ajami

The current troubles of the Obama presidency can be read back into its beginnings. Rule by personal charisma has met its proper fate. The spell has been broken, and the magician stands exposed. We need no pollsters to tell us of the loss of faith in Mr. Obama’s policies—and, more significantly, in the man himself. Charisma is like that. Crowds come together and they project their needs onto an imagined redeemer. The redeemer leaves the crowd to its imagination: For as long as the charismatic moment lasts—a year, an era—the redeemer is above and beyond judgment. He glides through crises, he knits together groups of varied, often clashing, interests. Always there is that magical moment, and its beauty, as a reference point.

Mr. Obama gave voice to this sentiment in a speech on Nov. 6 in Dallas: “Sometimes I worry because everybody had such a fun experience in ’08, at least that’s how it seemed in retrospect. And, ‘yes we can,’ and the slogans and the posters, et cetera, sometimes I worry that people forget change in this country has always been hard.” It’s a pity we can’t stay in that moment, says the redeemer: The fault lies in the country itself—everywhere, that is, except in the magician’s performance.

Forgive the personal reference, but from the very beginning of Mr. Obama’s astonishing rise, I felt that I was witnessing something old and familiar. My advantage owed nothing to any mastery of American political history. I was guided by my immersion in the political history of the Arab world and of a life studying Third World societies.

In 2008, seeing the Obama crowds in Portland, Denver and St. Louis spurred memories of the spectacles that had attended the rise and fall of Arab political pretenders. I had lived through the era of the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser. He had emerged from a military cabal to become a demigod, immune to judgment. His followers clung to him even as he led the Arabs to a catastrophic military defeat in the Six Day War of 1967. He issued a kind of apology for his performance. But his reign was never about policies and performance. It was about political magic.

[…….]

Five years on, we can still recall how the Obama coalition was formed. There were the African-Americans justifiably proud of one of their own. There were upper-class white professionals who were drawn to the candidate’s “cool.” There were Latinos swayed by the promise of immigration reform. The white working class in the Rust Belt was the last bloc to embrace Mr. Obama—he wasn’t one of them, but they put their reservations aside during an economic storm and voted for the redistributive state and its protections. There were no economic or cultural bonds among this coalition. There was the new leader, all things to all people.

A nemesis awaited the promise of this new presidency: Mr. Obama would turn out to be among the most polarizing of American leaders. No, it wasn’t his race, as Harry Reid would contend, that stirred up the opposition to him. It was his exalted views of himself, and his mission. The sharp lines were sharp between those who raised his banners and those who objected to his policies.

America holds presidential elections, we know. But Mr. Obama took his victory as a plebiscite on his reading of the American social contract. A president who constantly reminded his critics that he had won at the ballot box was bound to deepen the opposition of his critics.

A leader who set out to remake the health-care system in the country, a sixth of the national economy, on a razor-thin majority with no support whatsoever from the opposition party, misunderstood the nature of democratic politics. An election victory is the beginning of things, not the culmination. With Air Force One and the other prerogatives of office come the need for compromise, and for the disputations of democracy. A president who sought consensus would have never left his agenda on Capitol Hill in the hands of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.

Mr. Obama has shown scant regard for precedent in American history. To him, and to the coterie around him, his presidency was a radical discontinuity in American politics. There is no evidence in the record that Mr. Obama read, with discernment and appreciation, of the ordeal and struggles of his predecessors. At best there was a willful reading of that history. Early on, he was Abraham Lincoln resurrected (the new president, who hailed from Illinois, took the oath of office on the Lincoln Bible). […….]

In the oddest of twists, Mr. Obama claimed that his foreign policy was in the mold of Dwight Eisenhower’s . But Eisenhower knew war and peace, and the foreign world held him in high regard.

During his first campaign, Mr. Obama had paid tribute to Ronald Reagan as a “transformational” president and hinted that he aspired to a presidency of that kind. But the Reagan presidency was about America, and never about Ronald Reagan. Reagan was never a scold or a narcissist. He stood in awe of America, and of its capacity for renewal. There was forgiveness in Reagan, right alongside the belief in the things that mattered about America—free people charting their own path.

[…….]

There are no stars in the Obama cabinet today, men and women of independent stature and outlook. It was after a walk on the White House grounds with his chief of staff, Denis McDonough, that Mr. Obama called off the attacks on the Syrian regime that he had threatened. If he had taken that walk with Henry Kissinger or George Shultz, one of those skilled statesmen might have explained to him the consequences of so abject a retreat. But Mr. Obama needs no sage advice, he rules through political handlers.

Valerie Jarrett, the president’s most trusted, probably most powerful, aide, once said in admiration that Mr. Obama has been bored his whole life. The implication was that he is above things, a man alone, and anointed. Perhaps this moment—a presidency coming apart, the incompetent social engineering of an entire health-care system—will now claim Mr. Obama’s attention.

Read the rest – When the Obama magic died

Tags: Fouad Ajami, Harry Rweid, Nancy Pelosi
Posted in Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Healthcare, History, Politics, Progressives | 95 Comments »

Morsi schools Obama in the ways of the Arab world

by Mojambo ( 190 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Egypt, Islamists, Muslim Brotherhood at September 26th, 2012 - 3:00 pm

President Mohammad Morsi of Egypt must wonder what he has to do to raise the ire of the Obama administration with its feckless commander-in-chief and befuddled Secretary of State. The Middle East courses that Obama took at Columbia University aka Bir Zeit on the Hudson as Caroline Glick (also a Columbia graduate) refers to it as under Rashid Khalidi taught him all the wrong ideas.

by Fouad Ajami

“I don’t think that we consider them an ally, but we don’t consider them an enemy,” President Obama said, on September 12, of the tangled relationship with the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo. “They’re a new government that is trying to find its way,” and there would be some “rocky times” ahead.

The day before, crowds had scaled the wall of the American embassy in Cairo, burning the Stars-and-Stripes, in protest against the video, “The Innocence of Muslims,” that had triggered protests in twenty Muslim nations. No diplomats were killed in Egypt, as they were next door in Benghazi. But an American president obsessed with his election campaign, sure that the foreign world could be held at bay, was reminded of the hazards of imperial power in a fractured Islamic world ever ready for an anti-American riot.

[…]

He put the Americans on notice, giving them a preview of the difficulties of dealing with a “democratic” government unlikely to show American authorities excessive deference. The “soft Islamists” had come to power, and Washington had to adjust to life after the autocrats.

The harvest of the Arab Spring has brought forth a new breed of Islamists. Washington neither gave birth to them, nor has it been capable of thwarting their rise to power. The charge that the distant power had pushed Hosni Mubarak under the bus is tendentious and silly. A hurricane swept the autocrats out of power. Their rule rested on fear, and suddenly, fear was broken.

The Tunisians were done with the Mafia reign of “the family,” as the regime of Zeine al-Abdini bin Ali was called. Egypt was through with Mubarak; it had tolerated him for three long decades, and now it wanted more for itself than a drab dictatorship of an aging Pharaoh. There had not been gifted storm trackers among the Americans, people who could read and anticipate the gathering storm. This new president—Egypt’s first democratically elected one—had come out of that great wind that had come upon the Arabs. He was not eager to please the powers in Washington, paymasters who had been giving aid to Cairo since the mid-1970s.

“Successive American administrations,” he told The New York Times, “essentially purchased with American taxpayer money the dislike, if not the hatred, of the peoples of the region.” There was a powerful truth in this remark: The Pax Americana had befriended, and financed the dreaded autocrats, and those cunning rulers had displaced the wrath of their people onto the United States.

We had “allies” in the saddle, in those impenetrable Arab lands, but we could never crack the code of these regimes, nor truly come to terms with the manner they feigned friendship with us as they fed a culture of anti-American incitement. That “American Raj” in Cairo had given us Ayman Zawahiri and Mohamed Atta. No tears need be shed for the age of the dictators.

Doubtless, it will be hard dealing with Morsi, a faithful product of the Muslim Brotherhood, but we should not be nostalgic for the reign of Hosni Mubarak, the Pasha on the Nile. He had been treacherous in his own way.

The Ironic Rise of Morsi

For America, the irony of the rise of Mohamed Morsi is that this colorless functionary of the Muslim Brotherhood is the first Egyptian ruler steeped in American ways. His doctorate in engineering comes from the University of Southern California, which he earned in 1982. A village boy from the impoverished Delta, he had made his way to the United States, courtesy of a government scholarship. In hindsight, he claims that he was shaped by America only “scientifically.” But he hadn’t been eager to leave the United States after completing his degree. He stayed on as a faculty member at California State University at Northridge.

This big American republic is suffused with contradictions: It was in Los Angeles that Morsi’s wife was pulled into the orbit of the Muslim Brotherhood. Two of Morsi’s sons were born in the United States. The American net had pulled Egypt along. It shaped and helped countless Egyptians, and, with this, comes the free-floating anti-Americanism now at play in Egypt.

[…]

This was a flawed history, and modernist Egyptians know that. It was the coming of the West—most dramatically, the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte’s military expedition off the coast of Alexandria, in 1798—that had pulled Egypt out of its destitution and lethargy. Bonaparte had come with his celebrated team of savants. They brought with them curiosity, studied the flora and the fauna of Egypt, and their monumental work, Description de L’Egypte, volumes of inquiry, gave Egyptians the full measure of their history.

Sure enough, colonialism, direct and indirect, humiliated Egyptians, and for decades they were outcasts in their own country. But colonialism (much as it did in that singular encounter between England and India) had invented modern Egypt. The British may have been brutes in that Suez Canal zone when they dominated it, but European finance had built the Suez Canal.

Mohamed Morsi may want to flatter himself that it was solely the teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood that shaped him, but this fifth president of Egypt after the fall of the monarchy is the first civilian, and the first to receive a coveted American doctorate. The Brotherhood may have always railed against America, but leading technocrats from the Brotherhood rose to professional success and prominence through American degrees, and the years in America took them beyond the cloistered world from which they hailed.

Muslim Brothers Bow to Reality

Morsi and the collective leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood know the terms of Egypt’s relationship with the United States. They are in need of American financial assistance—theirs is a country which is the world’s top importer of wheat, a burdened country with a budget deficit of 11 percent of GDP. Governance in Egypt is tethered to feeding and subsidizing a huge, and rebellious population. Rulers have leeway in that crowded country, but food riots have been the nightmare of rulers. Washington’s help is crucial, and the Brotherhood knows when purity has to yield to necessity.

In the immediate aftermath of Mubarak’s demise, the Brotherhood had proudly asserted that it would not turn to the International Monetary Fund for assistance: Populism was the rage. The Brotherhood talked of raising a $3.2 billion loan on the domestic market. Now the loan has risen to $4.8 billion, and the technocrats of the Brotherhood, negotiating with the IMF, are full of sweet reason.

[…]

Morsi may claim, as he does now, that America’s standing in Egypt, and in the wider Arab world, depends on Washington brokering a “just peace” between Israel and the Palestinians. But reason of state trumps the needs of the Palestinians. It should be recalled that the great peace-maker and pragmatist, Anwar al-Sadat, who pulled Egypt out of the swamp of the Arab-Israeli conflict, was always keen on paying tribute to that old Palestinian claim.

Defer as they will to Washington on the Camp David Accords and peace with Israel, the new leaders of Egypt can call Washington’s bluff. The perennial threat, popular in the U.S. Congress, of cutting off aid to Egypt, is hollow. A small minority in Congress has hankered after that. But Egypt’s leaders have always operated on the premise that their country is too big to fail.

Like riverboat gamblers, they relish the game, secure in the knowledge that a country of more than 80 million people, at the crossroads of the world, so near to the oilfields of the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf, a Sunni balance to Shiite Iran, will always be bailed out. The Egyptian education of Barack Obama came in late, but it came nonetheless.

Some historically literate staffer should have narrated to President Obama the tale of that even more flamboyant and glamorous visitor to Egypt, Napoleon Bonaparte. The French adventurer had landed in Egypt at age thirty with a dream of an empire stretching from Egypt to the Indus.

“We must go to the East,” he said. “All the great men of the world have there acquired their celebrity. The East is the nursery of kings.” But the dream was not to be. His fleet was destroyed by the British, Egypt rebelled against his forces, and, eleven months after his arrival, the General deserted his army and slipped back to France.

Read the rest: Morsi, Obama & the beginning of a beautiful friendship

Tags: Fouad Ajami
Posted in Barack Obama, Egypt, Islamists, Muslim Brotherhood | 190 Comments »

The Lessons of Oslo and Palestinian Statehood

by Mojambo ( 35 Comments › )
Filed under Israel, Middle East, Palestinians, United Nations at September 26th, 2011 - 9:15 am

Fouad Ajami (who knows more about Middle East history then any of the writers at the New York Times and Washington Post) – reminds us of the failed history of Palestinian and Arab attempts to negate the birth of a Jewish state. He states that peace can never be imposed by outsiders (which should be obvious to all).

by Fouad Ajami

‘U.N. 194″ is the slogan of the campaign to grant the Palestinians a seat at the United Nations, to recognize their authority as the 194th nation in that world body. This is the Palestinians’ second chance, for there was the session of the General Assembly in 1947 that addressed the question of Palestine, and the struggle between Arabs and Jews over that contested land.

A vote took place on the partition resolution that November and provided for two states to live side by side. It was a close affair. It required a two-thirds majority, and the final tally was 33 states in favor, 13 opposed, 10 abstentions, and one recorded absence. Israel would become the 58th member state. The Palestinians refused the 59th sea

Arab diplomacy had sought the defeat of the resolution, and the Palestinians had waited for deliverance at the hands of their would-be Arab backers. The threat of war offered the Palestinians a false promise; there was no felt need for compromise. The influential secretary-general of the Arab League, the Egyptian Azzam Pasha (by an exquisite twist of fate a maternal grandfather of al Qaeda’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri), was to tell a talented, young Zionist diplomat, Abba Eban, that the Arab world was not in a compromising mood. “The Arab world regards the Jews as invaders. It is going to fight you,” he said. “War is absolutely inevitable.”

For the Zionists, the vote was tantamount to a basic title to independence. But the Jewish community in Palestine had won the race for independence where it truly mattered—on the ground. Still, theirs was a fragile enterprise.

Britain, the Mandatory Power in Palestine since the end of World War I, had wearied of the Zionists, of the Arabs, and of the whole sordid burden of adjudicating their competing claims. The British Empire was broke and looking for a way to reduce its burdens. In August 1947, it had given up India, the Jewel of the Crown, and stood aside as a wave of cataclysmic violence between Hindus and Muslims provided a shameful end to a long imperial dominion. It was no use shedding blood and treasure in Palestine, and Pax Britannia was eager to pass the problem onto the U.N.

Nor were matters clinched for partition, and for the cause of a Jewish state, in the American councils of power. President Harry Truman was indecisive. He drew sustenance from the Bible and the cause of Jewish statehood tugged at him, but he was under immense pressure from a national security bureaucracy that had no sympathy for the Zionist project. An accidental president who had come to the presidency after the death of FDR, he lacked the self-confidence a crisis of this kind called for.

His secretary of state, Gen. George Marshall, was dubious of the idea of partition, fearful that a war would break out over Palestine that would require the intervention of American troops. Truman stood in awe of Marshall, regarded him as one of the “great commanders of history.” Secretary of Defense James Forrestal was more antagonistic still. There were oil interests in the Arab world, and a big strategic position in the region to protect.

[…]

But the scenarios of doom for the new Jewish state were not to be fulfilled. Israel held its own. And the Palestinians who had bet on the Arab cavalry riding to the rescue were to know defeat and dispossession. Their cause was subsumed under a wider Arab claim, mandatory Palestine was to be divided—there was the new Jewish state, Jordanian sovereignty over the West Bank and east Jerusalem, Egyptian control over Gaza. The victory of Israel two decades later in the Six Day War reunited the land and, ironically, gave the Palestinians a chance to release themselves from pan-Arab captivity.

“We need to have full membership at the U.N. We need a state, a seat at the United Nations,” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared last week in Ramallah as he launched this bid, in defiance of American wishes. Thus state-building would be bypassed, and the Palestinians, in a familiar pattern of their history, would place their faith in deliverance through the indulgence of others.

But were the Palestinians to look at their history, they would come to recognize that the one break that came their way happened in 1993, through direct negotiations with Israel. The peace of Oslo that secured them their national authority, that brought Yasser Arafat from his Tunisian exile to Gaza, was a gift of direct diplomacy. Arafat was looking for redemption; he had bet on Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War of 1990-91 and lost the financial support of the Arab oil states. Israel, for its part, had just elected a war hero, a stoical, determined man, Yitzhak Rabin, as its leader, and he had campaigned on the promise of getting “Gaza out of Tel Aviv.”

[…]

A generation after that handshake, the lesson of that accord remains unaltered. There can be no avoiding the toil and the exertions of direct negotiations. The deliberations at the U.N. are only theater, just another illusion.

Read the rest: Palestinian statehood and the lessons of Oslo

Tags: Fouad Ajami
Posted in Israel, Middle East, Palestinians, United Nations | 35 Comments »

The Obama Spell Is Broken

by Mojambo ( 248 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Progressives at February 2nd, 2010 - 5:30 pm

Fouad Ajami is always a great read. I think he hits on something when he writes about Obama’s over weening sense of hubris and the speed in which Obama and his cronies are trying to ram down our throats their programs before the public wakes up. Never forget that only the September 2008 financial crisis combined with the milquetoast candidacy of John McCain put this fraud in the White House. Charles Krauthammer jokingly refers to 2010 as Anno Domini 2.

by Fouad Ajami

Unlike this president, John Kennedy was an ironist who never fell for his own mystique.

The curtain has come down on what can best be described as a brief un-American moment in our history. That moment began in the fall of 2008, with the great financial panic, and gave rise to the Barack Obama phenomenon.

The nation’s faith in institutions and time-honored ways had cracked. In a little-known senator from Illinois millions of Americans came to see a savior who would deliver the nation out of its troubles. Gone was the empiricism in political life that had marked the American temper in politics. A charismatic leader had risen in a manner akin to the way politics plays out in distressed and Third World societies.

There is nothing surprising about where Mr. Obama finds himself today. He had been made by charisma, and political magic, and has been felled by it. If his rise had been spectacular, so, too, has been his fall. The speed with which some of his devotees have turned on him—and their unwillingness to own up to what their infatuation had wrought—is nothing short of astounding. But this is the bargain Mr. Obama had made with political fortune.

He was a blank slate, and devotees projected onto him what they wanted or wished. In the manner of political redeemers who have marked—and wrecked—the politics of the Arab world and Latin America, Mr. Obama left the crowd to its most precious and volatile asset—its imagination. There was no internal coherence to the coalition that swept him to power. There was cultural “cool” and racial absolution for the white professional classes who were the first to embrace him. There was understandable racial pride on the part of the African-American community that came around to his banners after it ditched the Clinton dynasty.

The white working class had been slow to be convinced. The technocracy and elitism of Mr. Obama’s campaign—indeed of his whole persona—troubled that big constituency, much more, I believe, than did his race and name. The promise of economic help, of an interventionist state that would salvage ailing industries and provide a safety net for the working poor, reconciled these voters to a candidate they viewed with a healthy measure of suspicion. He had been caught denigrating them as people “clinging to their guns and religion,” but they had forgiven him.

———————————————————–

Mr. Obama’s self-regard, and his reading of his mandate, overwhelmed all restraint. The age-old American balance between a relatively small government and a larger role for the agencies of civil society was suddenly turned on its head. Speed was of the essence to the Obama team and its allies, the powerful barons in Congress. Better ram down sweeping social programs—a big liberal agenda before the people stirred to life again.

Progressives pressed for a draconian attack on the workings of our health care, and on the broader balance between the state and the marketplace. The economic stimulus, ObamaCare, the large deficits, the bailout package for the automobile industry—these, and so much more, were nothing short of a fundamental assault on the givens of the American social compact.

————————————————————–

Americans don’t deify their leaders or hang on their utterances, but Mr. Obama succumbed to what the devotees said of him: He was the Awaited One. A measure of reticence could have served him. But the flight had been heady, and in the manner of Icarus, Mr. Obama flew too close to the sun.

We have had stylish presidents, none more so than JFK. But Kennedy was an ironist and never fell for his own mystique. Mr. Obama’s self-regard comes without irony—he himself now owns up to the “remoteness and detachment” of his governing style. We don’t have in this republic the technocratic model of the European states, where a bureaucratic elite disposes of public policy with scant regard for the popular will. Mr. Obama was smitten with his own specialness.

In this extraordinary tale of hubris undone, the Europeans—more even than the people in Islamic lands—can be assigned no small share of blame. They overdid the enthusiasm for the star who had risen in America.