Barack Obama's problem

Posted By: Stephanie Gutmann at Mar 8, 2009 at 14:31:07 [General] Posted in: Foreign Correspondents Tags: Barack Obama, Berlin speech

I remember the day last July when candidate Barack Obama gave a speech in Berlin. I was living abroad, getting my news from SKY and so able, unlike most Americans, to watch the speech live and in full.

After it was over I picked up the phone and called a friend back home. “It’s worse than we thought,” I told him. “The guy’s actually crazy.”

Now, the word “crazy” is kinda harsh as the twenty-somethings say, but in the space of 30 minutes I had just heard candidate Obama trumpeting his ambition to tackle: “terrorists who threaten our security in Afghanistan” and “the traffickers who sell drugs on your streets.” He suggested he would: “defeat the Taliban,” “help the Afghan people develop their economy and rebuild nation,” “renew the goal of a world without nuclear weapons,” “secure all loose nuclear materials,” “stop the spread of nuclear weapons,” “reduce the arsenals from another era,” and “join in a new and global partnership to dismantle the [terror] networks that have struck in Madrid and Amman; in London and Bali; in Washington and New York.”

Just warming up, he moved on to speaking of his “resolve” to: “build on the wealth that open markets have created, and share its benefits more equitably,” ” forge trade that truly rewards the work that creates wealth, with meaningful protections for our people and our planet” and “answer the call for a new dawn in the Middle East” which would entail telling Iran “that it must abandon its nuclear ambitions,” “support[ing] the Lebanese who have marched and bled for democracy”, get “Israelis and Palestinians to a two state solution,” and “support the millions of Iraqis …[as they] rebuild their lives, even as we pass responsibility to the Iraqi government and finally bring this war to a close.”

Many of pols would have ended it there, but Obama then told the huge crowd it was time to “come together to save this planet.” That entailed “resolv[ing] that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands” and getting “all nations. [to]..reduce the carbon we send into our atmosphere.”

An administration would be remiss, he suggested, if it did not “lift the child in Bangladesh from poverty…shelter the refugee in Chad..stand for the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe,” and give “meaning to the words ‘never again’ in Darfur”

“Banish[ing] the scourge of AIDS in our time” was almost an afterthought tossed in there with saving bloggers in Iran, voters in Zimbabwe, and starving children in Darfur.

Now comes the news via Tim Shipman’s article for Saturday’s Telegraph that the president is feeling tired by all he’s taken on. A source told Shipman that “Obama is overwhelmed. There is a zero sum tension between his ability to attend to the economic issues and his ability to be a proactive sculptor of the national security agenda.”

“That was the gamble these guys made at the front end of this presidency and I think they’re finding it a hard thing to do everything.”

No kidding. The question is will he admit he’s human or keep trying - how ever haphazardly - to do knock off each of the items on this checklist?

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/stephanie_gutmann/blog/2009/03/08/barack_obamas_problem