Friedman on Obama

Two days ago I noticed Thomas Friedman in the New York Times drawing up a list of background conditions for the Arab revolts. Here’s the part on Obama:

“Americans have never fully appreciated what a radical thing we did — in the eyes of the rest of the world — in electing an African-American with the middle name Hussein as president. I’m convinced that listening to Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech — not the words, but the man — were more than a few young Arabs who were saying to themselves: ‘Hmmm, let’s see. He’s young. I’m young. He’s dark-skinned. I’m dark-skinned. His middle name is Hussein. My name is Hussein. His grandfather is a Muslim. My grandfather is a Muslim. He is president of the United States. And I’m an unemployed young Arab with no vote and no voice in my future.’ I’d put that in my mix of forces fueling these revolts.”

While I doubt the link is quite as direct as Friedman suggests (it seems more likely that the election of Obama and the Arab revolts are symptoms of some deeper underlying shift in the world) I like his basic point about Obama.

I was an ardent Obama supporter (and donor), especially from 2007 onward. I’ve been fairly disappointed in him for the past couple of years, not because I expected “more progressive” policies (they’ve been about what I expected) but because I feel that he’s often been wasting his once-in-a-generation or once-in-a-lifetime rhetorical gifts. Reagan was perhaps even less influential through his policies than through his skill with words. “The medium is the message.” Would free-market capitalism have reached almost intellectually unopposed status in the USA without Reagan as its poet laureate? Maybe not.

But Friedman reminds me here that there’s another angle on “the medium is the message.” For even if Obama just sits in the White House and does absolutely nothing (and he’s done better than that), his mere presence in the White House remains a very powerful fact. I believe even Chomsky said something along those lines about him.

We have a half-Kenyan President named Barack Hussein Obama. Sometimes we have to remember how incredible, unlikely, and inspiring that was. (And I doubt it would have happened this early, if not that Bush made such a depressing mess of things.)