The Obama swoon

Gerard Baker:

Bill and Hillary Clinton are miffed that the American media have fallen in a collective swoon for the phenomenon that is Barack Obama. You can't blame them.

The tone and even the content of so much of the verbiage that pours from television and newspapers on the subject of the man seems to channel Rodgers and Hart, via Ella Fitzgerald:

I'm wild again, beguiled again,

A simpering, whimpering child again

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered...am I.

In fairness, though, the beguiling of the American liberal mind by this first-term senator from Illinois looks like sober contemplation compared with the ecstasy he has induced in the synapses of the rest of the world.

The Germans call him, without irony, the Black JFK. The BBC evidently thinks he's the best thing to come out of America since, well, in their rather limited worldview, since Jimmy Carter. If you listen carefully you can hear grown men wandering the corridors of London, Brussels and Berlin, crooning as they ponder an exciting new future:

I'll sing to him, each spring to him,

And worship the trousers that cling to him

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered ...am I.

It's hard to escape the feeling that all this excitement is going to be repaid in the devalued currency of disappointment. Mr Obama's ego is certainly writing cheques his body can't cash. There's an expectation that a President Obama will change everything in America's relations with the world. But my guess is that, for all his campaign rhetoric and for all his genuine intent, the facts on the ground won't change much.

He will be able to do little or nothing new about Iraq. And in return for all those nice commitments he is going to make about multilateralism, global warming and international law, he will, if anything, step up America's demand for hard European action in the fight against terrorism - especially boots on the ground in Afghanistan - something Europeans are not going to want any part of. If he is half-serious about some of the things he has said on trade, he is going to pit the US against the rest of the world in ways that might make diplomats yearn for the tranquil days of George Bush.

And yet there's no doubt he has a view of the world that is closer to European attitudes than anything we have seen in the past seven years and it is this that keeps Obamania in full swing. The effect is heightened, of course, by the identity of the Republican nominee.

The same morally simple narrative that hails Mr Obama as Luke Skywalker, bursting out of America's Death Star, is beginning to portray John McCain as a kind of Darth Vader. Mr McCain is already, in the media's account, the grumpy old white man who emerged from a field of grumpy old white Republicans.

...

The problem is that there's a danger that the presidential contest between Mr Obama and Mr McCain will become not a debate but a silly battle of conflicting icons. You can be sure that, in the eyes of the rest of the world, and much of America, if Mr McCain wins it will be not because of his superior experience or the quality of his ideas, but because America is irredeemably racist.

Instead of being the welcome break with America's recent past that he truly is, he will be painted as a continuation of it. Worse, that that, he will have won by vanquishing Hope and Peace. He will be for ever The Man Who Shot Bambi.

In reality, Obambi will have shot himself with his naive policy positions that keep bouncing up against the real world. Already his Iraq position is not the king's X he and the Democrats thought it would be, because the McCain position is being demonstrated as successful.

Personally, I am still not afraid to say that I like President Bush and do not think his policies have been a disaster for the US or the world. He has done much good not only in Africa, but in Iraq and Afghanistan too. The bad that has been done in Iraq was done by our enemies. It is part of the perverseness of liberalism that they try to attribute the wickedness of the enemy to those who are trying to stop the wickedness. The Obama argument is that if only we had not tried, and continued to live with the existing wickedness of Iraq, people would still love us. Bull.

Liberals would be blaming the President for doing nothing about Saddam. The jihadis that were flowing into Iraq would have been flowing into Afghanistan creating more havoc there in terrain that is much more suited to an insurgency than Iraq. If Iraq was a diversion, it was a diversion for the jihadi forces who had hoped to lure the US into a quagmire in Afghanistan. Instead, Iraq became a quagmire for the jihadis and they have suffered a significant strategic defeat there with the rejection of their cause by the Sunni tribes.