When the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced this morning that it was awarding President Barack Obama the Peace Prize for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” Obama became only the third sitting president to receive the honor. The other two were Woodrow Wilson, who received the honor in 1920 for his futile efforts to establish the League of Nations, and to Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 for his negotiating peace between Russia and Japan.
Only nine months into his administration, Obama apparently won the Prize for his tone in reaching out to Muslims, exemplified in his ground breaking speech delivered in Cairo earlier this year; his urging to the international community to address pressing global problems such as climate change and the reduction of nuclear weapons, when he recently addressed the UN General Assembly.
But those are as much aspirations as achievements; no one can argue that Obama won because of anything he’s done. In fact, as Charlie noted on Twitter, it would be a mistake to think Obama got it just because he wasn’t Bush (though let’s not kid ourselves — that most definitely was part of Committee’s thinking). It’s more accurate to say that Obama is being honored for turning the supertanker, so to speak — moving the United States away from the disruptive role it played in world politics and back toward its more traditional role as leader and partner.
Now, as the old saying goes, the proof will be in the pudding. The pressure on Obama to deliver on Afghanistan, Iraq, Middle East peace, climate change, and nonproliferation has just gotten significantly — perhaps exponentially — greater. And then there is that sticky issue of human rights, which seems to have taken a back seat to realism in this administration. More to come on that last point later.
Take a moment to watch this clip. It’s from an Obama town hall appearance yesterday in Farmington Hills, Michigan.
At first glance, it seems pretty good. He says that “there should be no contradiction between keeping America safe and secure and respecting our Constitution.” He gets in a good shot in about the need to catch the terrorists before you worry about what to do with them. And he has a great line at the end: “Don’t mock the constitution. Don’t make fun of it! Don’t suggest that it’s un-American to abide by what the founding fathers set up.”
Those are all good points. The problem is that along the way, he violates two fundamental rules of messaging:
1. Don’t use your opponent’s talking points to frame your arguments. Obama did that on three occasions:
“Senator Obama is less interested in protecting people from terrorism than he is in reading them their rights.”
“You may think it’s Barack the bomb thrower, when in fact it might be Barack, the guy running for president.”
“The reason you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism.”
When you do this, you reinforce people’s preconceptions about you. If folks are already inclined to worry about whether you’re the right guy, then what they’re going to hear is that Obama is soft on terrorism, has a Muslim name, and is interested in protecting the bad guys.
2. Don’t try to convince people with facts. Obama spends over a minute explaining the concept of habeas corpus. He sounded like a professor. Most people don’t have any idea what the words “habeus corpus” mean. But they do understand the underlying principle: that sometimes, our government makes mistakes, and we need rules to protect innocent people from being thrown in jail indefinitely. They’ll understand that much more readily than talking about how this right goes back to before we were a country.
So what should have Obama said? How about something like this:
You know, all of us want to be treated fairly. You could say that’s the basic idea behind the Constitution and the Bill of Rights: do unto others as you would have them do onto you. In this country, we give people the chance to be heard. We promise them that they won’t be tortured. We say to them that they have the right to prove that they are innocent of the charges against them, and that they don’t have to incriminate themselves.
These are our core values. These are incredible gifts that the founding fathers gave to us. And these are the very things that our opponents are now mocking. How dare John McCain and Sarah Palin suggest that what was good enough for Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and Benjamin Franklin isn’t good enough for us.
Other than our familes, our freedoms are the most precious thing we have . They are what made this country great. They are the promise that all men and women are created equal, that we are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and, as you said so beautifully, ma’am, that we are the sweet land of liberty.
John McCain and Sarah Palin, just like George Bush and Dick Cheney, want you to believe that our security is more important than our freedoms. What you know and what I know — and what McCain and Palin and Bush and Cheney certainly should know is that we cannot have security without freedom. We cannot have justice without freedom. We cannot be America without our freedoms.
Those who suggest otherwise should be ashamed of themselves.
They should be ashamed for resorting to torture, for doing the very same things that John McCain himself suffered in Vietnam. They should be ashamed for letting places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, instead of places like Farmington Hills and Peoria define who we are. They should be ashamed for allowing waterboarding, beatings, sleep deprivation, and other techniques that we used to think only happened in places like Zimbabwe and Burma and Cuba. They should be ashamed of themselves for believing that it’s all okay because the President can do anything he wants anytime he wants.
That’s not my America. That’s not your America. That’s not George Washington’s or Abraham Lincoln’s or Teddy Roosevelt’s or FDR’s or JFK’s or Ronald Reagan’s America. Nowhere in our Constitution does it say the President can do anything he or she wants. Nowhere. That’s not Martin Luther King’s or Susan B. Anthony’s or Bobby Kennedy’s America. That’s George Bush’s America.
It’s time we reclaim our heritage of freedom, our role as that shining city on the hill. It’s time we say “not on our watch,” not here, not in Guantanamo, not anywhere.
It’s time that we say to Bush and Cheney and McCain and Palin and anyone else who supports them, we’re taking America back. We’re taking America back to what it stands for. We’re going to make America great again. We’re going to be the America that respects people’s rights, that honors our core values, that draws so many people around the world to our shores.
Let’s start showing the world why we’re better than our enemies. Let’s honor our founding fathers by returning to the values that make America America.
That would knock McCain and Palin on their butts. It would force them to explain why they support the very torture techniques that John McCain himself endured. It would make them explain why they aren’t un-American. It would require them to argue that they don’t want to destroy the Constitution or shred the Bill of Rights. Tar them with every sin of the Bush Administration, and do it in a way that will leave them no space to reply except by repeating your arguments.
That, after all, is exactly what they’re doing to the Democrats.
So for crying out loud, Senator Obama, stop defending yourself and start attacking them. It’s the only way you win.
P.S. To my colleagues in the blogosphere and the mainstream media, this goes double for you. Stop caring about how many times Sarah Palin lied about the bridge to nowhere and start talking about why Obama and Biden are the right choice. Stop parsing every lie that McCain and Palin tell and start talking about what their Administration would do to the country. And if you can’t, then shut the hell up.
The best quote of yesterday, perhaps of the entire convention season, came from a commenter on the Mudflats blog:
Jesus was a Community Organizer, and Pontius Pilate was a Governor.”
That got me thinking. Who else was a community organizer? Here’s a short list:
Mother Theresa (who got mentioned by the McCains more often than George W. Bush did)
Martin Luther King (who was featured in a RNC video earlier in the day)
Jane Addams (who campaigned in 1912 for Teddy Roosevelt, John McCain’s hero)
Abraham Lincoln
Nelson Mandela
Mahatma Gandhi
Vaclav Havel
The Dalai Lama
Aung San Suu Kyi
Thomas Paine
Mike Huckabee (yes, even Mike Huckabee — he was a church pastor)
Oh! I forgot one!
Sarah Palin (member of the PTA)
See, here’s the thing, Governor Palin. Anyone who organizes in the community — whether they are organizing poor people or moose hunters, crime victims or gun owners, is a community organizer.
You might want to take a few minutes and read de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America:
There is only one nation on the earth where use is made each day of the unlimited liberty to form associations. . . . This same nation is the only one in the world whose citizens have conceived of making constant use of the right of association in civil life and have succeeded in procuring for themselves in this manner all the goods that civilization can offer.
Or was this one of the books you had banned from Wasilla’s library?
Yesterday, I blogged about John McCain’s interview with the NYT, focusing on the fact that yet again, he admitted not understanding the intertubes. But something else about that story has been bugging me. Here it is:
Asked to name a conservative model, he skipped over the suggestions of three names typically associated with the conservative movement — Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Barry Goldwater, the founder of the modern-day conservative movement who occupied the Senate seat Mr. McCain holds today — to settle on Theodore Roosevelt.
Now to be fair to Senator McCain, this part of the article is so badly written, that it’s not clear whether McCain had called Roosevelt a conservative or the reporter just made the connection. Fortunately, the Times has the entire transcript. It’s worth quoting at length:
Nate Silver over at 538.com has a terriffic and fun post in which he lists all the recent presidents and presidential candidates to which Barack Obama has been compared. But why stop there? I went to The Googles for a few minutes and this is what I found.
Let’s look at earlier Presidents, for example. I started with two of the great ones — so great they have been immortalized in the Washington Nationals’ President Races. Obama is the new…
Okay, you get the idea. Here are The Google’s search results for Obama and other Presidents (three regarded as great, and one, well, not-so-much). Not every link is of the “Obama is the next…” variety, but there’s at least one in every search:
I couldn’t find anything for James Buchanan, Millard Fillmore or Franklin Pierce, but I’m guessing that at this point, Obama has been compared to at least 50 percent of American presidents. I would encourage someone else to do the research here.
But why stop at the prezzies? Some on the right, as I noted in my post on Bush, the Chinese and torture, love to compare the latest Democratic Presidential candidate to the worst people in history (and to be fair, most of these guys would be on my list too). Here are the search results for Obama and…
I’m sure if I looked hard enough I could find comparisons with Chavez, Ahmedinijad, and other such worthies, but I started getting bored after the first six.
Then, of course there are the inevitable comparisons to the heroes of various popular movements, some for good, some for ill. At least we can strike Jesse Jackson from this list:
Politico reporting Republicans will try to kill Senate reconciliation by offering amendment after amendment after amendment...
about 7 hours ago from Twitterrific
You know #BOEHNERFAIL has a certain ring to it. . . .Maybe be he should revert to the old pronunciation of his name...
about 8 hours ago from Twitterrific
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