Hendrik Hertzberg: The Obama Effect

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The Obama Effect
by Hendrik Hertzberg
June 22, 2009


Three days after President Obama’s address to the Arab and Muslim world, voters in Lebanon went to the polls to elect a new parliament. According to the Times, “most analysts” had confidently predicted victory for the electoral coalition led by Hezbollah—the Party of God, which is aligned with Syria and Iran, and has been responsible for most of the violence on Israel’s northern border. Most analysts, it turns out, were wrong. The moderate coalition, routinely described as pro-American and pro-Western, took seventy-one seats to just fifty-seven for Hezbollah and its allies.

The politics of Lebanon, a scalding soup of ethnic groupings, some of them armed and dangerous, make Chicago’s look like Montpelier’s. The words of an American President, even one from Chicago, were not necessarily foremost in the minds of the Shiites, Sunnis, Druze, and Christians of many theological varieties and political persuasions who lined up to cast their ballots and dip their thumbs in ink. But most analysts (they’re indefatigable) agreed that Obama’s speech, and the carefully constructed edifice of public diplomacy of which it was the keystone, was a factor in the outcome.

Meanwhile, as this was being written, a joyfully energized electorate was awaiting the results of a vigorously contested election for President of the Islamic Republic of Iran. No matter who wins—the jingoist-populist-obscurantist incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or his comparatively moderate main opponent, Mir-Hossein Mousavi—ultimate power will continue to rest with the “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his council of unaccountable theocrats, who kept liberal challengers off the ballot. But Iran is not a completely closed society. Change is in the Tehran air, and the American President’s openness is part of it.

In Cairo, Obama spoke for a little more than fifty minutes, the length of a university lecture or a psychoanalytic session. His speech had elements of both, and he offered his audience not only ordered information, argument, and context but also the catharsis of saying aloud things long unsaid. He wished, he said, to speak clearly and plainly, and that is what he did. When he lamented that the fear and the anger provoked by the “enormous trauma” of 9/11 had “led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals,” he called our most shameful act by its name, torture. When he reviewed the dismal history of our relations with Iran, he said, “In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government”—an apparently unprecedented Presidential acknowledgment. He called Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza an occupation, and he called the situation intolerable. He called Palestine Palestine. These are things that Muslim audiences are unused to hearing from an American President. By the same token, he called anti-Semitism vile; he called denial of the Holocaust ignorant and hateful; from the heart of the Arab world, he called for democracy and women’s rights; from an Egyptian lectern, he called for tolerance of Coptic Christians. These are things that, too often, Muslim audiences are unused to hearing at all.

The Cairo address had the qualities we have come to expect from Obama’s best speeches: empathy, frankness, respect for his listeners’ intelligence. This time, he had an inherited advantage. Many of the words and phrases he used would have sounded strained and pandering coming from any other Western leader, ever. But Barack Hussein Obama’s personal history drained the condescension from his recitation of the contributions of Islam to world civilization and of Muslims to American life. He sprinkled markers of respect: Islam was “revealed”; a mention of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad was followed, as in Islamic custom, by “peace be upon them”; the Koran was “the Holy Koran,” as holy as the Holy Bible.

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