Barack Obama — the one-term president
The party convention hoopla, both in Tampa and Charlotte, is now over. The Democrats wrapped up their convention this week with an impassioned speech by Bill Clinton on Wednesday and a stirring one by the president the following day — the one a plea to re-elect the incumbent for a second term and the other a promise by Obama to move America forward and make it a better place. Both speeches were delivered, given the venue and the audience, to predictable rapturous applause. The perennial question about whether Americans are “better off now” than they were four years ago was asked and then answered with facile ease at the convention by sundry speakers: Yes, yes indeed, and there are intimations of still better times ahead.
Then came the balloon drops. And the delegates from Ohio and other hick states took off their outsize funny hats and marched out of the arena.
Not so fast, guys. Let’s touch base with the real world for a moment here. This is not Denver, Colorado, 2008, a Democratic convention that was imbued with the zestfulness of self-confidence and the lyricism of the presidential candidate’s acceptance speech. Four years ago, everybody, Democrats, independents and a not insignificant number of Republican ‘drifters’ — the latter disturbed by the deeply flawed administration of a departing George W. Bush — were seduced by the fact that Obama was charming, articulate, intelligent, informed and — if you were one of those Americans who believed in giving minorities, at long last, a place at the table — African American. That was then.
Now, however, we are looking at a battle-scarred president whose domestic policy, no less than his foreign policy, has floundered. During his tenure as the chief executive, he has shown himself to be weak, indecisive and dithering, ready to knuckle under when the going got tough. His promises, of change that matters, of the audacity of hope, of how yes we can, remained unfulfilled.
For this columnist, who as a political commentator can not afford to be a one-issue citizen, the low point nevertheless came when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sat in the Oval Office across Barack Obama, the president of the United States of America, and lectured him, as he wagged his finger, on how Israel will not stop building colonies on Arab land — contrary to long-held and oft-stated US policy — and that is that. Obama chose to eat humble pie, took it on the chin, and forgot the lofty pledges he had made about Palestinian statehood and about the need for America to address with equity the concerns of people in the Arab world and the Muslim world.
In his famous speech in Cairo in 2009, he averred, and averred some more, that his administration will heal the gaping wound in the diplomatic relations between Arabs and Americans, and end Washington’s hitherto lopsided Middle East policy, a policy that since the late 1960s had put America on a collision course with Arab history. All came to naught as Israel, right or wrong, came first. When you kowtow to Israel, anywhere, anyhow, anytime, you kowtow when Israel tells you to do so.
You want kowtow? I’ll show you kowtow. Consider this: At the Democratic convention last Wednesday, President Obama, seeking to appease pro-Israel pressure groups, and ward off criticism from Republicans that he is cool toward Israel, personally directed his party to amend its platform on Jerusalem by declaring the city “the Israeli capital,” a decisive change in the tenor of America’s Middle East policy over the last 45 years. The approved change stated formally that “Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel.”
In the eyes of millions of Arab American and Muslim American voters, by doing that, Obama killed himself at the convention, if only metaphorically, mere weeks before he was to kill himself at the polls. Why did he have to do it then and there, by kowtowing, when he could have done it dying with dignity by vote-count?
Obama’s is a sad tale, reminiscent of the opening sentence in The Earthquake in Chile, the novel by the German writer Bern Kleist, where we are shown a young Spaniard about to hang himself in the prison in Santiago, at the very instant of the great earth tremor of 1647.
There will be three presidential debates next month during which, no doubt, Romney and Obama will outdo each in expressing their support — pathetic in its ardor — for Israel. The conceit is not new. We will have seen it before. Unbeknown to both presidential candidates, however, will be the fact that the insensitivity of it all will only sow lasting venom for America in the hearts of young Arabs and young Muslims around the world. What a price the United States is paying to pamper this entity in the heartland of our world!
Yes, I’ll be at the polls, come Nov. 6, but instead of getting my vote, Barack Hussein Obama will get my boo.
n This article is exclusive to Arab News
Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Arab News' point of view
