When President Barack Obama first took office, it felt as though King Richard had returned from the Crusades. The restrictions on stem cell research were removed, funding was restored for overseas family planning groups’ abortion procedures, and on and on.
But now Americans and the world have had a chance to wrap their minds around the idea that honoring basic constitutional rights and acknowledging the existence of environmental concerns are concepts that shouldn’t be demanded but expected, and the seeds of doubt in our savior-president have been planted at last.
Obama may have disapointed as many as he pleased in his tour stop in Turkey on Monday. Taking questions from students at Istanbul’s Tophane-I-Amire Hall, Obama said he supported Turkey’s proposed entry into the European Union, despite the disapproval of Germany and France.
What he did not do was reference the recent controversy over the 1915 deportation and massacre of Armenians in Turkey. As a senator, Obama supported a bill defining the atrocities as genocide, but this week, as a president, he shied away from the issue. He mentioned, in his press conference with President Abdullah Gul, that Turkish-Armenian communications were improving, but never used the word genocide.
This was much to the disappointment of Armenian-Americans, many of whom still have direct ties to the hundreds of thousands massacred or exiled from Turkey during WWI, due to accusations by the Ottoman government that Armenians were pro-Russian and an internal rebellion threat.
This is becoming a disheartening trend with Obama: eager to please, but not necessarily to follow through. Suspicions are growing that President Obama may not be making change so much as avoiding blame.
Another theory, of course, is Obama has nearly a decade of lousy politics to clean up, and sometimes that may manifest itself in ways that aren’t pleasant. Keeping your approval ratings high while explaining to a nation that things may have to get worse before they get better is a daunting task, and it may require a little schmoozing here and there.
And then there is one other theory: the media is out for blood. For the past eight years, they’ve had such easy ammunition that now they’ve actually got to work to find fault with Obama’s politics. If that is the case, the fact that all they can dig up is that he sometimes avoids direct blame for problems is an easier fault to take.
