Obama Rules Out Talk with Hamas
- 03.04.2008 - 12:04 PMThe ever-diplomatic Barack Obama seems to have just backpedaled slightly on diplomacy. Ynet reports that Obama now shares George W. Bush’s policy of rejecting talks with Hamas. At a campaign stop in San Antonio, the senator said, “You can’t negotiate with somebody who does not recognize the right of a country to exist so I understand why Israel doesn’t meet with Hamas.”
Did he flip through a foreign policy folder, put his finger down at random and decide to look tough on whatever issue was there? That’s the only explanation for his Hamas stance. After all, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has exhausted his thesaurus finding words for “destruction” in regard to Israel, yet Obama remains eager to chat with the man who is, as one analyst put it, trying to “hotwire” the apocalypse. Maybe Ahmadinejad’s feel for inclusive annihilation appeals to Obama’s multicultural sensibilities.
In any event, it is clear that Obama felt the need to appear strong. Perhaps the above-it-all, heaven-on-earth love-in has actually started to go stale. This little shift could be a response to Hillary’s recent efforts to prove she’s more of a force to be reckoned with than is Obama. Maybe he thinks he didn’t excel in Hillary’s Farrakhan challenge. It also may have to do with larger trends: the continued progress in Iraq makes talk of troop withdrawal look more transparently political by the day and reminds Americans that the military option remains a viable one. Obama’s campaign experiment in hardball is ultimately meaningless. As easily as he’s adopted this stance, he could reverse it with the flimsiest of justifications. There’s no reason to take this as evidence that he’s ceased to romanticize “talk.”
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March 4th, 2008 at 12:36 PM
How much Kool-Aid do you expect the man to drink? He’s made all the obeisances that every major-party candidate makes, including threat noises about Iran at an AIPAC dinner.
Except for Iraq, he’s as interventionist as they come, although he may have a penchant for “human rights” adventures that have nothing to do with the U.S. national interest.
Do you think that he was insincere, or his character is such that he’ll “go all wobbly” in a crisis? Or is it just that he hasn’t been kneeling in the snow for long enough?
March 4th, 2008 at 12:44 PM
This will be seen as best evidence by Obama’s true believers, i.e., those who truly believed that he represented an end to the Zionist Elders’ control of U.S. foreign policy, that in fact, the Elders’ clutches were too powerful. One can hear Pat Buchanan, Juan Cole, John Esposito and other victims of The Lobby turning to one another, and saying, “You see, I told you so….”
March 4th, 2008 at 2:10 PM
New Politicians want to win, too.
March 4th, 2008 at 2:31 PM
The sad fact is that we are even discussing this as a position that is to the right of many in his party.
March 4th, 2008 at 2:42 PM
There is a much bigger problem for Obama now b/c of this dichotomy than whether he caved to the Jewish lobby he seems to believes in: there is no way to explain it away in the general election. McCain will eat him for lunch when he tries to straddle the difference between talking to Ajad (one of Hamas’s main sponsors) and not talking to Hamas. This is an “Inexperience” ad waiting to be made.
March 4th, 2008 at 4:32 PM
I would suggest that Obama is concerned about the rising Jewish American concerns regarding his advisors views re. Israel, lobby, his comments on the frayed relations between African-Americans and Jews, Farrakhan, his personal religious mentor, etc and he is attempting damage control.
I do believe the unfortunate consequence will be that it will throw fuel on the fire of the lobby conspiracy.
March 4th, 2008 at 6:14 PM
Yes, Obama is no doubt concerned about his deteriorating image in the Jewish community, and that explains in part why he’s decided to toughen up re Hamas. And he was pushed in the general direction of getting tough by Hillary’s 3am ad. Yet I detect something more: centrists and independents need to know that their president is not a pushover. My guess is his campaign finally is getting the message: Obama needs to start building a record of tough talk against someone other than Bush and Clinton.
Unfortunately for him, tough words now come much too late; he spent all of 2007 and the first two months of this year as the Kumbaya Kandidate. Whatever the new Obama says now, he will most likely find himself in conflict with the old Obama. Good luck with that, as they say!
March 5th, 2008 at 1:01 AM
it should be realized that those who say every constituency what they want to hear in order to win cannot be trusted by anybody as to what he will actually do.
there are 2 possibilities as to who obama really is: otoh, somebody who knows zilch about foreign affairs and says whatever he thinks he is expected to say to win votes. and on the other:
http://atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JB26Aa01.html
He is probably some combination of both. They are both scary.
oao
http://fallofknowledgeandreason.blogspot.com/
March 5th, 2008 at 11:15 AM
j lichty- being a hawk isn’t right or left. many prominent conservatives are not hawks and many prominent liberals are.