8 Years post-9/11, a lone voice from Chicago has the bullhorn

by smkovalinsky | September 11, 2009 at 07:03 pm

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The Associated Press ran this piece tonight: "Obama has the bullhorn on terrorism":

On Sept. 11, 2001, Barack Obama was driving to a state legislative hearing in Chicago when he heard the first sketchy reports of a plane hitting the World Trade Center on his car radio. The 40-year-old state senator spent the afternoon in his law office watching "nightmare images" of destruction and grief unfold on TV.

Within days, he'd issued a statement about what the nation should do next.

Beyond the immediate needs to improve security and dismantle "organizations of destruction," Obama wrote, lay the more difficult job of "understanding the sources of such madness." He wrote of "a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers," of "embittered children" around the world, of the seeds of discontent sown in poverty, ignorance and despair.

The nuanced musings of an obscure state senator, Obama's statement never even made the big Chicago dailies.

Americans were listening instead to President George W. Bush, shouting into a bullhorn at Ground Zero. To weary rescue workers and a sorrowing nation, Bush declared: "The world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."

Eight years later, Obama has the bullhorn.

source:Associated Press

" A fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers": Listen to just how closely this rings with: a fundamental absence of empathy for the attackers.

I do not mean much in pointing this out: I am neither a liberal whose hackles will rise to defend the rights of the terrorist, nor a right-wing ideolog who will proclaim the evils of Jihad and all who grant them the tiniest concession. No, I point this out as a psychological observer of Barack Obama: Who can doubt that he couches certain "radical" ( I actually do not find them so) ideas by transposing his own thoughts? I observed him closely, even obsessively, on the campaign trail. I became familiar with - and grew fond of - the nuances of his speech, the little idiocincracies of his language, his gesture, expression, rhythm. I noticed a pattern: When he seemed fired up, a secretive look would belie the calmness of his speech. Something in the shift of the eyes, the slight pursing of the lips, gave me, at least, to udnerstand he was "biding his time". Masking his real anger, and shrouding his true righteous indignation behind a smokescreen of cool reason and charming congeniality, Obama never gave much away. But to the discerning, it was there: This was a man with a mission , for good or ill ( I believe a lot in the former, very little in the latter).

As the Assoicated Press says, the words so repeated with pride during the Bush-Cheney years, "War on Terror", now form a phrase very much out of vogue. Obama - I think rightly - knows that the love of the enemy is a powerful baffler and puzzler of the will. Jesus knew it, Martin Luther King knew it. A Commnander in Chief as well can yield it as a poweful, pragmatic weapon.

I am not certain how to reconcile Obama in Afghanistan with a break with W Bush though. I suppose every man has his piccadilos.

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