The conservative e-mail this morning is all about Obama showing weakness in the Middle East, his apologizing, his “humiliation.” But of course. They’ve been listening to the never-ending drumbeat on Fox News, where ambiguity must be a French word and anything less than overt threats is un-American.
From your less-partisan observers, the speech is getting pretty rave reviews. Indeed, some are calling it the most important speech by a president in the post-Cold War era.
And one can understand why the speech angers neoconservatives so. Though it contained no new policy proposals, it is a repudiation of the thinking that marked the Bush era, the arrogant belligerence that led us into blunder in Iraq, that actually helped fan the flames of anti-Americanism in the region. Your average knee-jerk Fox News neoconservative, all along, has seemed to think that force and threat of force would be enough - because force is all the Mideast understands.
Give Obama credit for thinking people in the Mideast, on the whole, might be a little smarter than that.
Obama is attempting to re-brand the United States. Think in advertising/marketing terms. If your brand has become associated with things negative, if that in fact hurts the ability of your brand to gain additional market share (indeed, if it’s causing you to lose market share), you need to reposition yourself in that market. You don’t do so by shouting the same advertising slogans, only louder; regardless of how large your market share, you don’t remain dominant in the market by insisting that you’ve done everything right all along, and it’s just the customers who are going to have to come ’round to you, dammit.
If that worked, we’d all be drinking New Coke.
Moreover, Obama’s overtures are specifically calculated to appeal to moderates within these Muslim societies. An oxymoron? In some instances perhaps; but if these overtures go nowhere, then at least the world’s most powerful nation has attempted to be gracious, rather than merely threatening. And then neoconservatives may still get the belligerent policies they think necessary.
