The Wall Street Journal
GLOBAL VIEW
By BRET STEPHENS
A President, Not a Symbol
March 11, 2008; Page A20
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There are many reasons the idea of an Obama presidency appeals to so many Americans, and not the least of them is that it appeals to so many non-Americans. He blends his several identities so seamlessly as to seem to be part everything -- and so for everyone, everywhere, to feel as if they have a part of him. He combines style, eloquence, youth and a common touch in a way the world hasn't seen in an American president since 1961. His soft-left brand of foreign policy, with its emphasis on global "challenges" rather than American interests, is broadly appealing to the rest of the world (or at least the segment that's in the business of writing op-eds that are later quoted back to American audiences).
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The question is whether the virtues that Mr. Obama would bring to the Oval Office as a symbol will translate into effectiveness as a president. The strong argument that they will rests on Harvard professor Joseph Nye's notion of "soft power": The idea that America's real strength rests not so much on its ability to impose -- as it can and often does through the military and economic tools of hard power -- but on its ability to attract. In this reading, Mr. Obama offers a double dollop of global promise, both because of who he is and because of what he says he will do: Talk to Hugo Chávez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; shut down Guantanamo; reduce carbon emissions and so on. Maybe all that will come to pass, and maybe all will be well. Clearly an Obama victory will mean that the U.S. will be better liked (or less disliked) in places like Britain and Germany, where the Illinois senator is often billed as a new Jack Kennedy or even Abraham Lincoln.
Less clear is whether Mr. Obama will be able to retain that sympathy. A man who seeks the presidency out of the audacity of hope gives himself little room to be "misunderestimated." The expectations are titanic, or Titanic. What happens to Obama-as-symbol when he actually has to govern, negotiate, settle for the unhappy and piecemeal compromises that are what democracy is about? What happens when he has to choose between the interests of his domestic constituencies -- on trade, for example, or the awarding of defense contracts -- and the interests of America's neighbors and allies? What happens when he has to bomb Pakistan for real, rather than in a Beltway policy address? The challenge Mr. Obama faces here is one reason Machiavelli warns his Prince about the dangers of being loved: "A wise ruler should rely on the emotion he can control, not on the one he cannot." Machiavelli, for one, understood that nothing is so sour as a soured love.
That's not to say that it hurts to be liked. But here, too, it's not clear that the affection that Mr. Obama seems so effortlessly to inspire necessarily inspires it to America's advantage. European admiration for Bill Clinton only seemed to increase after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but largely because he was seen as a simpatico politician hounded by America's puritanical masses. Mr. Clinton's popularity, in other words, was a kind of refracted signal of a deeper anti-Americanism.
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