Barack Obama has two imminent opportunities to test the effectiveness of his speech in Cairo today: Will it help the more moderate candidates win in next week's Lebanon election? The week after, will it help in transforming Iranian public opinion and make Iranians more prone to oust their radical president? Speeches, unlike literature, should not be judged as prose or poetry--but with Obama, we sometimes tend to forget that. The eloquence with which he conveys his message is almost always numbingly beautiful. Words, however, will not suffice; they will only be remembered as significant if they have consequences. Ronald Reagan's "tear down this wall" speech was remarkable when it was delivered, and was much more so when the wall was indeed torn down.
Obama's Cairo speech had a misleading quality to it. The president was speaking the rhetoric of Reagan, while intending to execute the policy of George H. W. Bush. Conveying the image of an emotional, forthcoming, and understanding bridge-builder, he is actually a cautious and calculated leader, wanting to scale down America's foreign policy--back to the days when "interests" were king, not "ideologies." Obama is a new type of the old "realist." He is a realist with feelings--one that can naturally combine a call for halting Iran's nuclear weapons because of "America's interests" (and others') with his personal story of "an African-American with the name Barack Hussein Obama."
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