The title of today�s column is borrowed from an episode of �Seinfeld,� in which George Costanza decides that, in any given situation, he is going to do the opposite of what he normally would do. By the end of the program, the perennial loser has a beautiful girlfriend, a new job and his own apartment.
Slate�s Jacob Weisberg argues that President Obama is doing the opposite of what George normally would do--George W. Bush, that is--but things aren�t going so swimmingly for him:
Obama, who did not have much global expertise before coming to office, molded his approach [to foreign policy] around his predecessor�s errors. Bush�s naive idealism and unilateralism encouraged Obama�s realism and multilateralism. Bush�s boycott of North Korea, Cuba, and Iran fed Obama�s eagerness to engage pragmatically with those tyrannies. Bush�s neglect of the Mideast peace process fed Obama�s urge to plunge into it. The new president has reversed the old one�s prioritization of Iraq over Afghanistan and, in what has become the political clich� of 2009, tried �hitting the reset button� on relations with Russia.
In so doing, Obama now faces an inverted set of hazards: getting overcommitted in Afghanistan, putting too much faith in the United Nations, accommodating dictators instead of standing up to them. Most alarmingly, given all that his predecessor did to discredit them, Obama has failed to stand up for the broader ideas of democracy promotion and humanitarian intervention. Surely if not for Bush, Obama�s instinct after the Iranian election would have been to identify with those risking their lives to free their country, not to get back to his attempt at dialogue with Ahmadinejad.
You�ve got to love Weisberg�s heads-I-win-tails-W-loses attitude. Even when Weisberg believes Bush was right and Obama was wrong, it�s STILL Bush�s fault. Obama would have done the right thing if only Bush had done the wrong thing!
Now, in fairness to Weisberg, he does intend this as a criticism of Obama: �Politicians, like generals, suffer from a tendency to fight the last war.� And his argument doesn�t stand up all that well under scrutiny: Bush, after all, engaged in plenty of pointless diplomacy with Iran and North Korea, and Obama has fallen far short of delivering on his campaign promises regarding Iraq and detainee policy.
But let�s entertain Weisberg�s argument that Obama�s indifference to democracy and insouciance in the face of Iranian brutality are the product of a reflexive anti-Bushism. Isn�t this a much more damning indictment than Weisberg realizes?
After all, Bush is supposed to have been the worst president in history, and a moron to boot. (It was Weisberg who invented the �Bushism of the Day,� though he has largely left the field to others since the Democrats came to town and started saying silly things.) By contrast, a year ago Weisberg was worrying �that Obama may be too handsome, brilliant, and cool to be elected.�
Handsome and cool the president may be, but how brilliant is it to forgo thinking for oneself and instead simply follow the lead, albeit in reverse, of a man who (it is claimed) is manifestly inferior? Unthinking opposition to the president was far too common on the left during Bush�s term, and it is far too common on the right today. But it is easier to excuse unthinking opposition from the opposition than from men who are called upon to lead.