Obama's Empty Rhetoric Will Fail Him in Office

Human Events, Mar 10, 2008 by Babbin, Jed

That CINC-ing Feeling

Barack Obama's tent-revival rhetoric stirs his followers' emotions. But in them there is a disturbing lack of the usual tools of leadership that may indicate a disqualification to serve as Commander-in-Chief.

Great leaders have to be great communicators, not just orators. Throughout history, they have used more than mere appeals to emotion. From Caesar to Churchill, they have all given context and weight to their speeches by showing they have a command of the facts, of history and of literature.

Devoid of Knowledge and Understanding

Obama's speeches are devoid of these essential elements. Why? Apparently because he lacks the knowledge and understanding to employ them.

Obama gained national attention with his speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. It was a purely emotional appeal, borrowing style from Martin Luther King, Jr. Instead Of "I have a dream," Obama incanted "I believe."

His campaign speeches are equally devoid of substance and historical reference. In his response to the President's State of the Union Address, Obama said, "I believe a new kind of politics is possible, and I believe it is necessary-because the American people can't afford another four years without healthcare, decent wages, or an end to this war."

What this "new kind of politics" is and how Obama will create it are left to our imagination. Last month, in his stock condemnation of Washington, he said, "It's a Washington where decades of trade deals like NAFTA and China have been signed with plenty of protections for corporations and their profits, but none for our environment or our workers who've seen factories shut their doors and millions of jobs disappear." Is he naïve enough to believe that all our trading partners-including totalitarian regimes such as China and kleptocracies such as Saudi Arabia-will adopt American environmental and labor standards if only we ask them to?

Of the facts, Obama has little grasp. He insists, for example, that there was, no al Qaeda presence in Iraq before we decided to invade it. But Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was in Baghdad as early as June 2002 and was confirmed operating there in September 2002. By the time of the invasion, al Qaeda was deeply embedded in the Sunni Triangle, its operational organization having been established in the six months we fiddled and diddled at the UN before the invasion.

Obama's judgment-what little we know of it-lacks a foundation in history and evidences no understanding of how the levers of American power can be pulled to move the world.

Does he really believe the war that the terrorists and the nations supporting them are waging against America will end with a retreat from Iraq? Or does he understand how our withdrawal from Beirut in 1984 and our retreat from Somalia emboldened our enemies? Has he read any of bin Laden's or Zawahiri's screeds bragging of how Islam defeated America in those instances?

What Do We Know?

What do we know about Barack Obama?

We know he often ducks responsibility, as he did when-having voted earlier that day-he was absent from the Senate when it voted on Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn's resolution condemning the infamous MoveOn.org "Petraeus/Betray Us" ad. We know that when he does vote on national security matters, he gets it wrong. He voted against the bipartisan Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) bill last month, one of only 29 senators voting "no."

We can learn much about a man by what he reads, what influenced him in his youth. Obama's youth-as much as we can learn about it-is in his early memoir, Dreams From My Father. Obama was born in August 1961-the "memoir" was published in 1995 when he was 34.

Dreams From My Father reads like a historical novel by Leon Uris or Alex Haley. It is a long string of recounted conversations, written as if he recalled them verbatim, including details of what people wore, how they sat and what the weather was like while he was growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia and in his early career in Chicago. Dates to place them in context are not provided.

We can learn a lot about a man by discovering what he read and what influenced his mind in his formative years. Churchill said, "Study history, study history. In history lie all the secrets of statecraft." Has Obama studied history? If so, he does not value it enough to mention it. In Dreams, Obama mentions only one book that influenced him-the autobiography of black radical Malcolm X. Obama writes, "Only Malcolm X's autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me-the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in discipline, forged through the sheer force of will."

What does Obama know about the military? In Dreams, the only reference is in a conversation "with a young man named Kyle who had been considering an Air Force career and then rejected it because the Air Force would never allow a black man to fly a plane. Obama disagreed, but Kyle won the argument by asking, "Yeah, well ... how many black pilots you know?" Apparently, Obama didn't know of any, not even the Tuskeegee Airmen or tiieir most successful member, four-star Air Force Gen. Daniel "Chappie" James.