COLUMN DU JOUR

O: From 'centrist' to suave extremist

Victor Davis Hanson chronicles multi-layered flame-out of president
--National Review

Once Upon a Time . . . Whatever happened to the old Barack Obama?

By Victor Davis Hanson

Once upon a time, a fresh new politician, Barack Obama — black, young, eloquent, and hip — soared with rhetoric about hope and change. The people were mesmerized. What a contrast with the tongue-tied outgoing president, George W. Bush, and his unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan!

Presidential Candidate Obama sensed their ecstasy, and so he made two great promises: 1. Whatever Bush was, he would not be, and 2. despite the right-wing slander about his former intimacy with Bill Ayers, the Reverend Wright, Father Pfleger, Rashid Khalidi, and all his other old Chicago radical friends, Obama would be a centrist, a cooler version of Bill Clinton. There were to be no more red/blue state divides. The most partisan politician in the Senate promised a new era of bipartisanship. He who had profited from identity politics would suddenly be beyond race.

The people were considering voting for this unknown, fresh, hope-and-change candidate — a decision made easier after the financial meltdown of mid-September 2008. They decided then that they wanted a new-frontier moderate, a JFK for the 21st century, who would put competence and style over ideology — and clean up the financial mess left by Wall Street and the greedy Republicans.

Obama also promised that he would craft a foreign policy from the bipartisan center, while making us liked abroad once more. During the campaign, to reassure the doubtful, he name-dropped at length Republicans with whom he would consult: old centrist pros like Dick Lugar and Bob Gates, as well as four-star generals.

But having been elected, President Obama sensed that, just maybe, the United States was part of the problem rather than the solution. So he shunned Israel and warmed up to Syria and the Palestinians. He cut off relations with Honduras. He ignored our ally Colombia while reaching out to Castro, Chavez, and Ortega. Putin’s Russia received more deference than did most of Russia’s old vassals in Eastern Europe. The British were snubbed in gratuitous fashion.

When hundreds of thousands of Iranian dissidents went out in the streets to protest their theocracy’s rigged voting, Obama voted present — or perhaps accepted beforehand that the reformers would fail. After all, dealing with a lunatic revolutionary Iranian government would showcase far better his own singular multicultural finesse.

Meanwhile, Obama went on an apology tour abroad. He inflated the accomplishments of the Islamic world, magnified his own country’s sins, and once again blamed Bush for America’s global unpopularity. In short, it was not intrinsic differences in ideology and objectives, but the prior president, that explained the tension with Europe, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.

A common theme was that the new president, Barack Obama — suddenly referencing his family’s Muslim roots and his African lineage in a way that others dared not during the campaign — was as skeptical of America’s history as were its critics, who likewise doubted there was anything “exceptionalâ€