Obama's rivals now look like Lilliputians to his Gulliver

Obama's rivals now look like Lilliputians to his Gulliver
Jonathan Freedland

He has proved himself the decisive, macho leader Americans crave. And the timing is perfect for his Afghanistan plans


Last week, when Barack Obama released his birth certificate to silence those who had long questioned his American identity, he explained that he did not normally respond to such nonsense because "you know, I've got other things to do". Now we know that those "other things" included meticulous planning for an event that could well transform his presidency, reshaping both the way he is seen and the foreign policy he pursues.

That Obama was able to announce the death of Osama bin Laden so soon after he had crushed the absurd charge that he was a foreign (maybe Kenyan, maybe Indonesian, maybe both!) usurper of the White House felt oddly appropriate. For the success of the operation in Abbottabad now makes Obama's rivals look small indeed, Lilliputians chasing wild fantasies while Gulliver deals with the things that matter. He has rendered even more laughable Donald Trump's declaration that "I feel proud of myself" for flushing out the proof of Obama's Hawaiian birth. The president has shown what a true achievement looks like.

For, like it or not, no trophy mattered more to American public opinion. As the perpetrator of the most lethal terrorist attack on US soil, Bin Laden was a national hate figure, loathed far more viscerally than, say, Saddam Hussein. That's why his death brought spontaneous midnight crowds to Times Square and Pennsylvania Avenue – a response that never greeted the capture of Saddam. One US commentator described Sunday night as feeling like VE Day. Obama's role in slaying the dragon may not make him a national hero, but it will take a special kind of stupidity for Republicans to question his patriotism now.

The killing in Pakistan will bury another criticism, rarely articulated explicitly: the suggestion that Obama was somehow insufficiently tough, insufficiently macho, to be America's commander-in-chief. It was there in the mockery of his taste for "arugula", the repeated descriptions of him as "professorial". A former speechwriter for Mario Cuomo, the hardball ex-governor of New York, once told me: "There is a subtext of male violence that runs through American politics." He reckoned male voters especially want to believe the president could take a guy out if needed, that he is capable of aggression. This partly explains the rapturous response that greeted Obama's merciless slapdown of Trump during his stand-up at the White House correspondents' dinner on Saturday night. Americans need to know their president has steel. Crude though it may be, Obama just passed that test with flying colours of red, white and blue.

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From now on Obama will be viewed slightly differently at home and abroad, his coolness understood to be unflappable and poker-faced, rather than chilly and professorial. One former foreign minister who has seen the president up close believes that Bin Laden's scalp will lead other world leaders to conclude that, to paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, "Obama may speak softly – but he carries a big stick". Expect the comparisons with Jimmy Carter – whose own raid to rescue US hostages in Tehran famously failed – to dry up pretty quickly.


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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/02/obama-administration-barack-obama?CMP=twt_fd

No matter what, the actuality of no more OBL is now on the books as an Obama success. It's obviously painful for some, but it's the truth.

And he will not take down Boehner and the rest of the GOP in the budget fiasco.