Obama, the god that failed

April 05, 2011

By Paul Kengor

As someone who has studied, taught, and written about the Middle East for years, I'm the first to concede that President Obama has a tough task. What would I do about Libya if I were president? How about Egypt?

I'm not exactly sure. The situations are complex, with too many daunting unknowns. Chief among them, who, or what, precisely, is behind the opposition? Would a Gaddafi or Mubarak be replaced by Muslim democrats or theocrats, by an Ayatollah, by a Hamas, by a Hamid Karzai, by a Saddam or Sadat, or perhaps by the first Thomas Jefferson in the Arab world?

Of course, my personal struggle with the complexities doesn't matter much. I'm not president. Obama is. And alas, it's here, with Barack Obama as commander-in-chief, that the left once again has failed itself and America in the process.

The left pinned its hopes and dreams on Barack Obama. He wasn't merely another politician, he was post-modern, post-racial, post-cultural, post-political. We were told Obama didn't need political experience. His international upbringing, his multi-national background, his inherent diversity and multiculturalism, his youthful hopping and groping from country to country, culture to culture, faith to faith, through Islam, Buddhism, asceticism, Christianity, Augustine, Aquinas, Graham Greene, Nietzsche, Rev. Wright, and whatever else -- heaped atop his overflowing innate brilliance -- would beget a new breed of political man, a supreme decision-maker worthy of the most vexing challenges. He was no George W. Bush; he was the anti-Bush.
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There's a distinct intellectual vacuity among the American left. I'm reminded of a Reagan quote regarding the distant-left cousins of liberals: "Marxist-Leninist thought," Reagan informed, "is an empty cupboard."

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