For Obama, hysteria on both sides

Before issuing their next daily declaration that Barack Obama's presidency is proving a pointless exercise in the same old, same old, progressive bloviators with nothing to lose and bloggers inclined to Victorian vapors should keep in mind his telling remark from that press conference of March 24th: that his is a "philosophy of persistence."

Like the second Roosevelt, Obama was signaling a subtle conservatism of approach, but not goals. He understands that what some on his left seem to believe can be accomplished literally overnight may in fact require four to eight years, if that soon. I agree with the disillusioned as to the dismayingly slow pace of profound change -- and I, too, have urged a quicker one in some realms, especially health-care reform -- yet we should all calm down and remember that little of permanency comes from haste.

The latest on-air, in-print and cyber outcry over Obama's insufferable foot-dragging came last week over his halfway Cuba measure: he lifted some travel restrictions but not our trade embargo. Typical, just typical, was the word from his critics to the left -- no real change.

What Obama did in tandem with lifting those travel restrictions, however, was to announce, in a kind of diplomatic dance, his one and only bargaining chip. His administration, he said again at the Summit of the Americas, is "prepared to ... engage with the Cuban government on a wide range of issues -- from human rights, free speech, and democratic reform to drugs, migration, and economic issues."

Note the order of progression. You give us this -- liberalization -- and we'll give you that: trade. And sure enough, it was also last week that Cuba's president, Raúl Castro, announced for the first time that his government is "willing to discuss everything, human rights, freedom of press, political prisoners, everything, everything, everything they want to talk about."

How long will all that talking take? Hell I don't know. Maybe a year, maybe two years, maybe longer, maybe less. The point is, Obama now has some political cover to talk. More important, within those talks he has something of real value to Cuba to withhold -- which he would not have had, had he instantly done what everyone knows will someday be done anyway: lift the embargo.

At this point it's purely a matter of timing. Yet under Obama's clock, won't everyone be better compensated through extractions of human rights promises that we otherwise, through precipitous action, would have foregone? -- human rights promises, that is, which the left correctly insists on from rightist dictatorships, but rarely from leftist ones?

A philosophical persistence, not to mention a certain philosophical consistency. That's what Obama revealed at the Summit of the Americas last week; and in the long run -- one perhaps unbearably long for some -- it'll pay out more than impetuosity would.

Obama, as hinted at above, also needs to watch his right flank -- especially in relation to questions of foreign policy. That adverb cannot be emphasized enough. They're watching and waiting, randy to unleash the bugbear of Democratic weakness on national security. And friend, it won't take much.

Witness the right's gleeful mournfulness in reaction to Obama's handshake with Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, a virtual nonentity nevertheless recast by the right as the greatest threat to world peace since Joseph Stalin. "[Obama] has made life easier for the Castro dictatorship in Cuba, why not embrace or at least be cheerful and friendly with Hugo Chavez?" croaked that little toad of a Big Thinker, Newt Gingrich. "I think it sends a terrible signal to all of Latin America, and a terrible signal about how the new administration regards dictators."

Laughable, yes, but that's been the right's primordial drumbeat for 60 years and, sadly, it's been an effective one. Knowing this, a spokeswoman for John Boehner chimed in, saying that -- ready? -- by shaking hands Obama gave Chávez the "opportunity" to "exploit whatever publicity he can get at the expense of the United States" -- no joke, she really said that -- and yesterday on CNN's "State of the Union" Republican Senator John Ensign labeled Obama's cordiality "irresponsible." Good grief.

The slightest diplomatic courtesy is like a dinner bell to these overwrought ghouls. But I'll cut them some slack; they're playing just about the only card they've got.

What card did Obama play in response? The one that, in time -- assuming he's allowed time, by his "friends" -- will shrewdly go a long way in sillifying the right's hysteria: good-natured ridicule. "Venezuela," he noted at a Summit-closing press conference yesterday, "is a country whose defense budget is probably 1/600th of the United States'.... It's unlikely that as a consequence of me shaking hands or having a polite conversation with Mr. Chávez that we are endangering the strategic interests of the United States."

I just hope that Obama isn't forced into publicly ridiculing the left's growing hysteria, as well.