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Jewish World Review
April 27, 2007
/ 9 Iyar 5767
Obama needs a second act
By
Michael Goodwin
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Barack Obama is on a roll. Every day brings fresh proof of his surge: He outperformed Hillary Clinton's vaunted machine in the early fund-raising and a new poll has him tied with her for the Democratic nomination.
If he were a stock, I'd sell him now. Until he gets a second act, Obama can only go down from here.
The burden of being different - the essence of his appeal - is starting to show on the rookie senator from Illinois. As the excitement of his entry into the race fades, it's not enough just to be the anti-Hillary, anti-Bush, anti-Washington candidate. We need to know more about him - how he sees events, how he thinks, what he would do. Like a character in a drama, we need to see him grow and develop new dimensions.
That's not happening, and so an opportunity may be slipping by. With Clinton in a rough patch of her own making - she's JFK one day, Harriet Tubman the next - Obama has picked a lousy time to show his clay feet.
Worse, he's putting them in his mouth, with his comments on the Virginia Tech massacre certifiably goofy. He used the murder of 32 students and professors to bemoan "the degree to which we do accept violence in various forms." He linked the slaughter to radio jock Don Imus' slur against the Rutgers women's basketball team, calling it "verbal violence." Then it was outsourcing, calling it "the violence of men and women who ... suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job has moved to another country."
Bad schools and bad neighborhoods were counted as other kinds of violence, then it was Darfur. He said we run our "foreign policy as if the children in Darfur are somehow less than the children here and so we tolerate violence there."
As Charles Krauthammer asked in these pages, "Is Obama, who proudly opposed overthrowing the premier mass murderer of our time, Saddam Hussein, suggesting an invasion of Sudan?"
No, Obama was just playing the liberal game of moral equivalency. It's a form of sloppy thinking where all bad things are equal, no matter their impact. Holding hands and singing "Kumbaya" is the universal antidote to all of them.
A speech he gave Monday fell into the same trap. "In today's globalized world, the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people," Obama told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. "When narco trafficking and corruption threaten democracy in Latin America, it's America's problem, too. When poor villagers in Indonesia have no choice but to send chickens to market infected with avian flu, it cannot be seen as a distant concern. When religious schools in Pakistan teach hatred to young children, our children are threatened as well."
The moral equivalency came wrapped in a platitude. "Whether it's global terrorism or pandemic disease, dramatic climate change or the proliferation of weapons of mass annihilation, the threats we face at the dawn of the 21st century can no longer be contained by borders and boundaries."
Obama did take a stab at priorities - briefly. He called the spread of weapons of mass destruction the "threat that rises above all others in urgency."
But what would he do about it? He pledged to build alliances and partnerships and, yep, work with the United Nations. First he would reform it, but not just so we could prevent wars, but also so we could stop the spread of avian flu and climate change and bring "dignity and opportunity" to the whole world.
Apparently, all those things are linked. And equal, too.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and the media consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Michael Goodwin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Daily News. Comment by clicking here.
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