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One Year Ago
To the Day
Obama Address Echoes Kennedy
(But Only Echoes)
Will Words Finally Be
Matched by Action?
Exactly one year
ago, the President of the United States delivered an address to the American
people that was expected to announce a request for Congress to explicitly
authorize strikes against the dictatorial regime in Syria, in response to the
crossing of the famous red line of the use of chemical weapons.
Instead, the
President turned back from his red line, and handed the initiative to our
Russian friend in the Grand Kremlin Palace.
We said then, in
many more words, that we would be entering dangerous waters, and we would pay
with interest for our failure to act at the time.
In that time, the
world seems to have come unhinged, with the spread of violent military and
terroristic advances in various places around the world, and the American
people have noticed.
Starting with our UWFR issue of September
7, 2013, and again in the issues of November
27, 2013, March
5, 2014, and June
23, 2014, we made the case that:
1)
The President was doing exactly what
Americans from all sides of the political spectrum wanted (we said this before
others in the media noted this).
2)
The fact above would not protect him politically from
the consequences of his then-poll-friendly policies because Americans
ultimately judge not by what a President does, but by whether he was
successful in what he did.
3)
Trouble would come as a result of his policies.
All of this has now
been shown to be accurate.
Exactly one year
later, on September 10, the President made another important address to the
nation, again on the question of the use of military force against murderous
actors in the same part of the world.
The
Power of Bad Optics
No doubt, the video
broadcasts of grisly beheadings of two American journalists have been a major
factor in fast-forwarding the change already happening in the nation’s mood,
and in forcing the President to act in the face of the horrific visuals. It was a tactical mistake on the part of
the terrorists of ISIL to put their deeds on video, and the President’s
seemingly muted initial reaction, followed by his golfing ‘optics’ fiasco,
may have actually further accelerated the shift in public sentiment.
Continued
column 2 >
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Ultrapolis
World Forecast &
Review
Ultrapolis
Project – ultrapolisproject.com
832-782-7394
Editor: Marco Antonio Roberts
Copy Editor: Michael Alberts
Contributing
Editors:
Mark Eastman
Mark Steele
contactproject@ultrapolisproject.com
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<
From column 1
There is no need
here to revisit all the negative coverage President Obama has been
receiving now for weeks on his foreign policy, where even media outlets
friendly to the President have been the venue for harsh criticism of the
President’s foreign policy; nor the polls that have drastically turned on
the President, even among Democrats.
Subtle
Change in Obama Words
As President
Barack Obama often has been when under tremendous pressure to salvage a
deteriorating situation, as he first was when he delivered another speech
to the nation in 2010 that saved his health care plan from oblivion (as we
predicted it would – leading some to incorrectly assume we were supporting
his health plan), and as he was one year ago, the President was eloquent.
And, in his eyes
there was a weariness, either of sincerity, or surrender, or maybe of the
plain endurance of having to give in to the demands of the world. Even as his words were not that different
than those he spoke on the same day the year before, save for the
self-contradiction mid-way through the earlier speech, this time they
carried a subtly different tone.
This time, there was a slightly longer reach into words of American
exceptionalism, of the benefits of American leadership in the world.
He closed with
this thought that took us beyond just national self-interest:
When we helped prevent the massacre
of civilians trapped on a distant mountain, here's what one of them said:
"We owe our American friends our lives. Our children will always
remember that there was someone who felt our struggle and made a long journey
to protect innocent people.”
That
is the difference we make in the world. And our own safety, our own
security, depends upon our willingness to do what it takes to defend this
nation and uphold the values that we stand for — timeless ideals that will
endure long after those who offer only hate and destruction have been
vanquished from the earth.
Continued column 3 >
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< From column 2
Americans Will Rally
Will Obama Rally?
The
country will rally behind the President, notwithstanding some conservative
talk show hosts’ reluctance to agree with anything the President does. His poll numbers will go up.
The
question is, will the President hold to his own new course to ensure success? Or will he be dragged through meeting
each permutation of the crisis? His
excellent words on foreign policy have mattered so little before, it is
difficult to tell.
The
next few weeks will reveal if the President has gone through a conversion a
la Carter ’79, or if he is once again going through the motions. But, if we had to wager now, we put the
odds that the President has re-calibrated, but only modestly, and he will
resist any escalation in the face of any circumstances that demand it. And, we do expect that he will avoid at
almost any cost a policy change that constitutes a clear admission that his
initial views on foreign policy were disastrously wrong.
There
was another American foreign policy leader who resisted all calls to
escalate a military engagement when all advisers insisted on it, once the
fighting started. His name was
Donald Rumsfeld.
Our forecast record cannot be
beat. One can follow the herd
chasing the latest hyperbolic, melodramatic, and soon-forgotten micro-trend
on Facebook and Twitter, or one can be wisely and judiciously in front of
it with UWFR.
Comments
may be directed to contactproject@ultrapolisproject.com,
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