Daniel Lubetzky

Related to an issue I had blogged about 6 weeks ago, Daniel Henninger writes in the WSJ that Obama’s real vulnerability is not his past connection to the Reverend Wright but his simplistic formulas on Iran:

Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, collector of centrifuges, makes

Jeremiah Wright look like Little Bo Peep. Yet this Tuesday Barack Obama said he assumes the American people will see it is "not weakness, but wisdom to talk not just to our friends, but our enemies, like Roosevelt did, Kennedy did, and Truman did." In the here and now, a more apt name comes to mind: Jimmy Carter.

A grand Enemies Tour awaits President Obama – Iran’s Ahmadinejad, Syria’s Assad, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, an al Qaeda "diplomat" from Osama bin Laden, Sudan’s Hassan al-Bashir, Zimbabwe’s Mugabe, Burma’s junta.

If John McCain can’t talk the American people out of re-Carterizing themselves, what has he been preparing for all these years?

This is high time for effective diplomacy and negotiations with "the other side." BUT an all-trusting all-goodness approach will not be trusted by or good for the American public – or the world, particularly when dealing with fundamentally totalitarian visions that are at odds with values of tolerance, respect and freedom on which modern society rests.

Obama needs to be able to remain the attractive unifier, the leader who rises above demonization, the man who denounces ideas rather than human beings – WHILE being able to show the mettle and edge that, for good or for bad, Americans seem to require in their Presidents. 

It is also helpful if he can show some intellectual rigor and recognize that his drive to unify America and the world can only be achieved with some humble acknowledgment to the limits of this vision.  Sadly, our world does occasionally produce Hitlers that we cannot just wish away.