Obama a Local Hero in Damascus

In many places ruled by despots, subject to strong popular waves of fanatical belief systems advocating violence against civilians, Barack Obama is considered something of a local hero. Damascus is one such place.

Syria’s enthusiasm for Obama, so widely shared among Muslim Arabs, is not surprising, given his endorsement of directly engaging states like Syria through creative diplomacy. Obama has repeatedly said that the United States should not speak only to its friends, but also to its enemies—in most cases, without the onerous “preconditions” that the Bush administration has laid down and that Syrian officials reject as tantamount to preemptive surrender.... Above all, Syria yearns to be taken seriously, or as Tony Badran, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a critic of the country’s leadership, puts it, a state that “seeks to project regional influence well above its weight by appearing to keep all options open to balance contradictory policies, like allying itself with Iran and hosting terrorist groups while offering peace talks with its enemies.”

At its core, Syria’s Obama infatuation reflects its intense disdain for President Bush, another widely shared sentiment in Arab circles. For the past three years, Washington has tried hard, if unsuccessfully, to isolate Damascus, [Ed: based upon] Syria’s secret efforts to develop a nuclear capacity, its pernicious meddling in neighboring Lebanon, its help in sending foreign fighters and arms across its border into Iraq, and its support for militant Islamists throughout the region—for Hamas in Gaza, Islamic Jihad in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iran, whose interests often coincide with but are not identical to its own. __CityJournal

Obama appeals to those who hate America on a visceral and irrational level. This is true both internationally, and within the US itself.

But in reality, it is Obama's vast "blankness" that appeals to such large groups of people with little in common. Obama is a media-generated Rorschach blot into which observers can see and read anything they wish to see. He has no record of substance, no achievements, nothing but a history of graft, corruption, and personal memoirs dedicated to radicalist politics.

A person who can say with a straight face that he supports Obama, is a person who does not take his politics seriously enough to dig for substance. Image is everything--at least that is what Andre Agassi used to say, when he lost more than he won. After he disciplined himself and mastered the game of tennis, he learned that image is actually a very small part of the reality of mastery.

North America and most of the western world is caught up in the aura of faddish fashionality. It is a superfluity that comes with a huge price tag attached, and when payment comes due, few people will be happy. Few, that is, except for most of Senator Obama's long-distance supporters, who want nothing more than the downfall of the western world.

If that is what they truly want, then perhaps they have chosen the right candidate after all.