Reprised: Obama’s Blunders Tell Me He’s a Naive Neophyte

From Susan: Larry and I, and then our growing family of writers, began writing so many stories on the candidates and the elections that we nearly lost track of the rich history of frank reports in our archives — those stories we wrote that provide the tell-tale “truth and nothing but the truth” that YOU and I knew even while the rest had stars in their eyes. Here’s an article I wrote in December 2007, and we’ll find some more. Sneak peek: Shoot to the end of this article, and click on the story about Hillary’s REAL biography that the “chattering class” never, ever mentions.

December 29, 2007: I keep thinking about those early December CBS Evening News candidate interviews that I recently mentioned. Each was asked which country scares them the most. Sen. Clinton correctly responded, “Pakistan” (CBS video). Sen. Obama said “Iran,” (CBS video).

It hit me that Obama has drunk the Bush/Cheney/Neo-con “Kool-Aid” exaggerating the threat of Iran — like he bought GOP talking points on Social Security — and hasn’t thought out real global concerns. Partly, it’s that he hasn’t traveled much; Steve Clemons is still trying to get an accurate statement from Obama on his travel history. [Susan, December 2008: We NEVER got Obama's travel history.] Nor has he done the hard work: He hasn’t held a single hearing as chair of the Foreign Relations’ subcommittee on European Affairs (which includes NATO and therefore Afghanistan, which Obama loves to bring up as neglected due to Iraq, but which he hasn’t done any “executive decision making” about — more on NATO/Afghanistan below the fold).

Dr. Reza Aslan, in a WaPo op-ed today, hits Obama’s weakness head-on. Obama’s besotted fans, like “conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan” (it’s so odd, isn’t it, that there are so many conservative fans of Obama) who “imagine” that:

[I]t is Obama’s face — just his face — that “proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can” …

Democratic voters had better sober up. It is “naive, well-meaning, amateurish.”

Dr. Aslan, who is the author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, continues:

[It is that Obama fans are] convinced that everyone understands the goodness of U.S. intentions — that worries me again these days. That’s because a curious and dangerous consensus seems to be forming among the chattering classes, on both the left and the right, that what the United States needs in these troubling times is not knowledge and experience but a “fresh face” with an “intuitive sense of the world,” and that the mere act of electing Obama will put us on the path to winning the so-called war on terror.

Here’s how Dr. Aslan begins today’s op-ed. It is a statement of warning:

Every time I hear about how Sen. Barack Obama is going to “re-brand” America’s image in the Middle East, I can’t help but think about Jimmy Carter’s toast.

When the idealistic Democrat came to Iran in 1977 to ring in the new year with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the country’s much-despised despot, throngs of young, hopeful Iranians lined the streets to welcome the new American president. After eight years of the Nixon and Ford administrations’ blind support for the shah’s brutal regime, Iranians thrilled to Carter’s promise to re-brand America’s image abroad by focusing on human rights. That call even let many moderate, middle-class Iranians dare to hope that they might ward off the popular revolution everyone knew was coming. But at that historic New Year’s dinner, Carter surprised everyone. In a shocking display of ignorance about the precarious political situation in Iran, he toasted the shah for transforming the country into “an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.” With those words, Carter unwittingly lit the match of revolution.

It’s just this sort of blunder — naive, well-meaning, amateurish, convinced that everyone understands the goodness of U.S. intentions — that worries me again these days. …

Dr. Aslan addresses the rapturous endorsement of the Boston Globe, and Obama’s failure to do the hard work required to give him necessary experience:

In their glowing endorsement of Obama, the editors of the Boston Globe noted that “the first American president of the 21st century has not appreciated the intricate realities of our age. The next president must.”

True enough. But such “intricate realities” are not best dealt with through “an intuitive grasp of global politics” — Obama’s chief asset, according to the Globe — but through an intimate knowledge of those realities and of the nuanced responses necessary to address them.

Obama may possess all the intuition of a fortuneteller. But as chair of a Senate subcommittee on Europe, he has never made an official trip to Western Europe (except a one-day stopover in London in August 2005) or held a single policy hearing. He’s never faced off with foreign leaders and has no idea what a delicate sparring match diplomacy in the Middle East can be. And at a time in which the United States has gone from sole superpower to global pariah in a mere seven years, these things matter.

The main issue in U.S. foreign policy that the next president will face is repairing our image in the world. But in foreign policy, unlike advertising, image is created through action, not branding. Which is why one cannot help but sense a touch of shirking (not to mention a lack of short-term memory) in all this talk about “intuitive experience” and “re-branding images,” particularly when it comes from those who began the “New American Century” as ardent supporters of Bush’s wars and his self-advertised “gut” instincts.

[T]hese things matter. Indeed they do.

Besides his diligent but frustrating effort to nail down Obama and his campaign staff on the true story of Obama’s travel history, policy expert Steve Clemons is also concerned about Obama’s work ethic in the U.S. Senate — emphasizing that Obama’s subcommittee is very important to Afghanistan:

I tried to deal with the question of how to measure “executive decision making capacity” when looking at legislators last week — and was pretty surprised that Senator Obama did not call a single issue-oriented hearing in his role as Senate Foreign Relations Committee Subcommittee on Europe Chairman.

Had Obama held such hearings — or even if he was planning them now for January — he might have highlighted Europe’s remarkable success in scoring the only tangible success with Iran on its nuclear program in September 2003.

Obama might also have focused his attention on Afghanistan — which Axelrod says we’ve all been distracted from — because Obama’s committee has jurisdiction over the foreign relations dimensions of NATO which is deeply embedded in the Afghanistan problem — which of course, is the Pakistan problem.

Indeed. In Deed: Obama’s failure to become active, to even hold a single hearing, to pay attention to Afghanistan or to NATO, has had its impact, in ways we’ll sadly never know about, on the current crisis in Pakistan.

A “face” is nice. A smart man, as Obama is, is also a great thing. But give me the worker. Give me the woman who has traveled the world (83+ countries, many, many times) and gone to countless remote villages, empowering women through microeconomic grants and more. Give me the one who really gets it done.

[SUSAN'S NOTE: DO YOU WANT TO KNOW HILLARY'S HISTORY? CLICK ON THAT LINK.]

It wasn’t that Sen. Clinton was prescient in responding “Pakistan” to the CBS Evening News question in early December. She knew. She knows. She’s done the work. She knows the world, and its complex and rapidly changing issues.

Obama’s Blunders Tell Me He’s a Naive Neophyte