Don’t Worry, Be Happy
Obama is a master of trading future calamity for temporary
gratification.
In his 1988 presidential race,
George H.W. Bush was trashed by the left for selecting the Bobby McFerrin hit
“Don’t Worry, Be Happy” as his campaign song. Maybe Bush thought he needed a
lighthearted optimistic echo of Reagan’s 1984 mantra, “It’s morning in America.”
But the Left thought the ditty confirmed the image of a callous and vacuous
Bush who didn’t “worry” enough about the poor and minorities. The liberal
McFerrin was outraged that Bush sought to play his own song at rallies. Shortly
afterwards, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” was quietly dropped by the Bush team.
Perhaps no other slogan better
characterizes the Obama tenure.
America is relieved that things at
least appear calm, as war and death rage abroad. At almost every
critical juncture, the administration chose short-term happy talk in lieu of
worries over long-term consequences. No matter how frequent the disasters
abroad, Obama can proclaim the world is at peace in an unprecedented age of
stability and security.
We did not lose a soldier in the
bombing of Libya. Only an ambassador and three U.S. personnel were killed in
the aftermath. As Hillary Clinton put it: “What difference does it make?”
Indeed, of Libya, she also chuckled: “We came; we saw; Khadafy died.”
That Libya is now a terrorist
beheading hellhole on the Mediterranean is someone else’s problem at some
future date. The bombing of Khadafy may have been the first time in U.S.
history that we bombed an autocrat out of power without staying around on the
ground to thwart the ensuing and inevitable chaos.
Was that “smart” diplomacy?
Remember “reset”? What happened to
it? Did it die in Crimea or Ukraine? For nearly four years, from a plastic
reset button to cancelled missile defense with the Czechs and Poles (how
prescient that anti-Iranian initiative of George W. Bush now seems in light of
the current talks), we were told how Obama and Hillary Clinton had undone the
damage that Bush had inflicted on Russian-American relations.
Then, after serial Putin aggression,
only silence followed.
There has not been a peep from the
administration about the fate of “reset,” much less about the long-term
consequences of appeasing Putin for four years. I think the Obama strategy is
to keep quiet about the disaster, hope that it takes Putin some time to digest
Ukraine, and then leave Putin’s agenda in the Baltic states to the next
president.
Why worry about Iran? They promise
not to make a bomb for a decade. Translated, that means that Obama (“I don’t
bluff”) envisions more laureate accolades for getting out of office ahead of an
Iranian nuke, and woe to the president who follows.
Pulling all U.S. peacekeepers out of
Iraq at the end of 2011 proved a useful short-term campaign talking point. But the ensuing vacuum birthed the “jayvees” of ISIS, who
probably also have a rendezvous with the next president. Why should anyone in
Malibu worry about Tikrit or the impending fall of Ramadi, or how a new,
low-grade caliphate might remake the Middle East?
Issuing various red lines and deadlines to the Syrians and Iranians sounded tough at the time, but
at some future date an American president is going to have to reestablish — at
some cost — the authenticity of an ultimatum by the president of the United
States.
But for the short term, Americans
were collectively relieved that Obama proved a gasbag and did not enforce the
threats.
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