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| President Obama's early attempts at conciliation with Republicans was interpreted as a sign of weakness. The Republicans promptly announced they were going to make him a "one term president" and tried to destroy his presidency. —Ronald David Jackson |
The most powerful politicians in the world today are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
Angela Merkel comes in a lame third, and the president of the United States isn't even on the map.
This is not a slam on President Obama. It's just how it is.
Chinese scholar Orville Schell, in an alarming story in the Oct. 23 New York Review of Books, described how China deliberately insulted former President Jimmy Carter on his recent trip to China.
Schell, our pre-eminent scholar of things Chinese, accompanied Carter and saw it with his own eyes. Carter, the most moderate of men, was so offended from the deliberate insults that he wanted to call off the rest of the trip and come home.
But Jimmy didn't do it because he's a good guy, and he knew the harm he could have done by acting like a human being.
Schell quoted Xi as saying - though not directly to Carter: "One part of the now-longstanding Chinese leadership critique of Western-style democracy is that it is prone to paralysis and gridlock and ultimately governmental weakness."
Can we deny it?
Look at Congress today. Look at it for the past six years.
In a biography of Julius Caesar, Adrian Goldsworthy proposed that one reason for the fall of the Roman republic was that "most of the Roman elite preferred to let some of the major problems facing the republic to go unanswered rather than see someone else gain the credit for dealing with them."
Ahem.
Since President Obama was elected for the first time, the U.S. Congress has devoted itself to crippling him. Speaker of the House John Boehner declared it his primary objective. And he's managed to do it.
This has nothing to do with who is right or wrong, or who is on "the right side of history." It's about power.
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