, Columnist
Barack Obama, a Parochial Leader for a Parochial Nation
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It wasn’t Barack Obama’s doing -- at least not fully. The crowds in Paris and Berlin, and the Muslims in Cairo and Karachi, eager to be done with President George W. Bush, took the new standard-bearer of American power as one of their own, a cosmopolitan man keen to break with the embattled certitude of the Bush years.
Obama didn’t try to disabuse them. He let the smitten believe what they wanted to believe. He was a blank slate, and they were free to project onto him what they wished.