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Current Events => General Discussion => Topic started by: formerlurker on February 02, 2011, 08:59:23 AM

Title: VDH: Obama’s 1979
Post by: formerlurker on February 02, 2011, 08:59:23 AM

Quote

Obama’s 1979
Are the wages of magnanimity to our enemies and snubbing of our allies once again coming due?

Obama’s deer-in-the-headlights, finger-to-the-wind, “I can’t believe this is happening to me” initial reaction to the Mubarak implosion has eerie precedents.

After the debacle in Vietnam, Watergate, the Nixon resignation, and the Ford WIN buttons, voters were willing to bet on the smiling but unknown hope-and-change reformer from Plains, Georgia. Jimmy Carter’s campaign and his early presidential speeches on resetting foreign policy sounded uplifting. They were certainly a rebuke to the supposedly dark Nixon-Kissinger realpolitik and cloak-and-dagger intrigue. Indeed, Carter’s election marked a return to Wilsonian idealism that predicated American support for other nations on shared commitment to human rights and U.N. values. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance exuded probity and almost seemed to suggest at every stop, “I am not Henry Kissinger.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/258548/obama-s-1979-victor-davis-hanson