Obama Love

Roger Cohen wrote a gushing, head-over-heels op-ed about President Obama's health care victory in the NY Times yesterday. Not only is health care an enormous domestic success, but its passage is also a major foreign policy win for Obama, says Cohen. Listen to this,

"This man is no softie. He’s a politician tough enough to watch his rivals auto-destruct on his cool, and principled enough to set the right long-term objectives, including 'comprehensive diplomatic contacts and dialogue' with Iran, as he said in his second Nowruz, or New Year, greeting to Iranians."

Cohen is simply starstruck. One health care bill, that barely passed both Houses even with the largest Democratic majority in decades and without a single Republican vote and with a majority of the nation against it, and Obama has become the Democrat's Übermensch. If Cohen loves Obama this much, then he would have really loved LBJ.

Think about it, LBJ gave us Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, all programs that current Democrats heralded as "historic legislation" during the health care debates. Has Cohen learned anything from history? How did LBJ's foreign policy fare? The answer: horribly. Johnson began the United State's military involvement in Vietnam, a war that made him rapidly unpopular and led to his failed re-election bid.

To say that President's Obama's health care bill is a "foreign policy victory," as Cohen terms it, is absurd. He goes on to say that,

"It fell to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to play the role Khrushchev once played in toughening a young American president.

The former Soviet leader thought he could browbeat Kennedy only to discover, in Vienna, that the Kennedy charm was not unalloyed to steel ('It will be a long, cold winter.') Netanyahu was the first foreign leader to think he could steamroll Obama. He earned a frosty comeuppance."

Victor David Hanson wrote a great response to Cohen's argument on the Corner at National Review. He highlights several reasons why Cohen's analogy fails. First, Netanyahu is not the first foreign leader to think he could steamroll Obama- Putin pulled the wool over Obama's eyes with his phony Iran missile deal and Ahmadinejad has been pushing forward with nuclear development at an unfettered pace. Second, Khruschev was the leader of a Communist regime trying to squelch freedom all across Asia and Eruope; Netanyahu is the leader of a democracy that has been a staunch ally of the United States. If Cohen is going to compare a leader of America's allies to the former head of Communist Russia, he should study his history first.