An American Lion

I have to admit that I am skipping these speeches by President Obama. Great speeches they may very well be, but very little action, in my opinion, is what they amount to and add up to. I’m a substance kind of person. Show me substance, and tell me what’s being done. I’m more interested in the things that are being accomplished as opposed to the lofty rhetoric. I guess it stems from not wanting to be fooled by smooth-talking leaders anymore.

The acceptance speech that President Obama gave when he received the Nobel Peace Prize has been scrutinized, and I see that the gap between himself and the previous occupant of the White House has shrunk some more:

And yet while Mr. Obama offered a nuanced speech laying out what some have already started to call an Obama Doctrine, he also made an unmistakable argument for the legitimacy of war – sometimes using the sort of phrases that called to mind the very words of the man he replaced.

“Evil does exist in the world,” Mr. Obama said as part of a long argument in favor of the concept of a “just war.”

That line brought to mind Mr. Bush’s repeated invocation of evil – including his argument in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks that “our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”

President Obama said there are times when “the use of force [is] not only necessary but morally justified”; he argued that he “cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.”

Cue Mr. Bush on the USS Abraham Lincoln, May 2003: “Any outlaw regime that has ties to terrorist groups or seeks to possess weapons of mass destruction is a grave danger to the civilized world and will be confronted.”

Mr. Obama also made the case for American exceptionalism, an attitude associated more with his predecessor.

America, he said, “has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.”

“We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will,” said Mr. Obama. “We have done so out of enlightened self-interest — because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.”

To be sure, the speech also included the sort of nuance that we’ve come to expect from Mr. Obama: He called himself a “living testimony to the moral force of non-violence” and said war is “never glorious” and “at some level is an expression of human folly.”

He said he was seeking “alternatives to violence that are tough enough to actually change behavior.” He spoke of the “spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.”

“He is a subtle guy,” New York Times columnist Tom Friedman said after the speech. “It wasn’t George W. Bush, you know, ‘we’re out there promoting freedom in every corner of the world, this is where we are.’”

If you’re like me, then perhaps you agree on the idea that President Obama holds the job right now because he was so unlike President Bush. If you’re like me, perhaps you realize that there’s no way President Obama could have gotten elected if there hadn’t been such a visceral rejection of President Bush and his policies.

Please note that this analysis comes from Tom Friedman at the New York Times and CBS news. I think that if you were going to make the case that the media were complicit in making Obama look like Bush, when he really wasn’t like him at all, you couldn’t fall flatter on your face than by saying that CBS news and the New York Times are biased against him. In point of fact, I think the charge carries more weight because of who is making the charge. If this was the Washington Times and the Weekly Standard, well, that would certainly change the context, wouldn’t it?

And yet, President Obama seems to have embraced Bush and run away screaming from Bill Clinton. Go figure.