Say Anything Blog

The gushing continues…

PARIS — From the front lines of Iraq to more genteel spots like Harry’s Bar in Paris, the election of Barack Obama unlocked a floodgate of hope that a new American leader will redeem promises of change, rewrite the political script and, perhaps as important as anything else, provide a kind of leadership that will erase the bitterness of the Bush years.

Whether it was because of Mr. Obama’s youth, his race, his message or his manner, some European leaders abandoned diplomatic niceties to compete for extravagance in their praise, while others outside the United States — fascinated by an election that had been scrutinized around the globe — reached for their most telling comparisons.

“There is the feeling that for the first time since Kennedy, America has a different kind of leader,” said Alejandro Saks, an Argentine script writer in Buenos Aires. Or, as Ersin Kalaycioglu, a professor of political science in Istanbul, put it, “The U.S. needs a facelift and he’s the one who can give it.”

Youth.  Race.  Message.  Manner.  Notice some things not mentioned there?  Like, oh I don’t know, accomplishments?  Leadership?

What this is telling me is that people are loving Obama because he’s young, looks good and sounds nice when he’s talking.  Can you get more superficial than that?

Naturally, the New York Times buries the negative comments about Obama way, way down in the story (yes, some people outside of America actually don’t think Obama’s anything all that special):

There were some glaring departures from the feel-good mood. One in particular illustrated the challenges that will test the president-elect: President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia chose the day to lambaste the United States and threaten new missile deployments. . . .

But even in the moment of triumph, some in Europe questioned whether Mr. Obama would really make a break with his George W. Bush, the least popular American president among Europeans in recent history.

“When Obama takes office on January 20,” the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said in an editorial, “we will see whether the Europeans — and especially the Germans — really just had a problem with Bush’s presidency or with America itself.”

Others were less cynical. “The margin of victory was emphatic and, whatever else follows, today the world changed,” said an editorial in The Times of London, and The Guardian newspaper proclaimed: “They did it. They really did it. So often crudely caricatured by others, the American people yesterday stood in they eye of history and made an emphatic choice for change for themselves and the world.”

That was not a universal view in Moscow where one analyst, Mikhail Delyagin, compared Mr. Obama to Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who is often blamed in Russia for destroying the Soviet Union.

“Not having large-scale management experience, he has greater chances to disorganize America, to destabilize America, out of the very best intentions, as Gorbachev once did.”

I know this fulsome praise from the international community must have liberals on cloud nine, but should we really be pleased about some of this praise?  Much of it comes from people who do not at all believe in the ideals America was founded upon (people like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for instance).  Those of individualism.  Personal responsibility.  Personal liberty.  Limited government.  They praise Obama’s victory because they feel Obama will move us away from those things.

And they’re not wrong.