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Max Boot with a look at Nelson Mandela and how he kept South Africa from becoming Zimbabwe.
While traveling around the country promoting my last book, Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present, I was often asked which insurgents I admired the most. The answer is those insurgents who have fought relatively humanely and, most important of all, once they have seized power have governed wisely and democratically and shown a willingness to give up power when the time came to do so.
This is not, needless to say, the norm. Much more common are insurgents like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Mugabe, Kim Il Sung, and (fill in the blank) who, while posturing as freedom fighters battling an evil dictatorship, swiftly become dictators in turn as soon as they seize power. The exceptions to that rule are some of the greatest figures of modern history–the likes of George Washington, Michael Collins, David Ben-Gurion, and, most recently, Nelson Mandela. …
… Mandela knew that South Africa could not afford to nationalize the economy or to chase out the white and mixed-raced middle class. He knew that the price of revenge for the undoubted evils that apartheid had inflicted upon the majority of South Africans would be too high to pay–that the ultimate cost would be borne by ordinary black Africans. Therefore he governed inclusively and, most important of all, he voluntarily gave up power after one term when he could easily have proclaimed himself president for life. …
… Mandela’s example is a ringing endorsement of what is derisively known as the “great man school of history”–the notion that influential individuals make a huge difference in how events turn out. He certainly made a difference, and for the better. He will go down as one of the giants of the second half of the twentieth century along with Reagan, Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping, Lech Walesa, and Pope John Paul II.
Charles Krauthammer on the thanklessness of being allied with the U. S.
Three crises, one president, many bewildered friends.
The first crisis, barely noticed here, is Ukraine’s sudden turn away from Europe and back to the Russian embrace.
After years of negotiations for a major trading agreement with the European Union, Ukraine succumbed to characteristically blunt and brutal economic threats from Russia and abruptly walked away. Ukraine is instead considering joining the Moscow-centered Customs Union with Russia’s fellow dictatorships Belarus and Kazakhstan.
This is no trivial matter. Ukraine is not just the largest European country, it’s the linchpin for Vladimir Putin’s dream of a renewed imperial Russia, hegemonic in its neighborhood and rolling back the quarter-century advancement of the “Europe whole and free” bequeathed by America’s victory in the Cold War.
The U.S. response? Almost imperceptible. As with Iran’s ruthlessly crushed Green Revolution of 2009, the hundreds of thousands of protesters who’ve turned out to reverse this betrayal of Ukrainian independence have found no voice in Washington. Can’t this administration even rhetorically support those seeking a democratic future, as we did during Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004? …
Telegraph, UK with another foreign disaster. This time Venezuela.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has insisted that a massive electricity blackout which plunged much of the country into darkness on Monday was the work of Right wing saboteurs hoping to influence the outcome of key municipal elections this weekend.
The leftist leader claimed to have proof that a deliberately severed cable was the cause of the power outage which hit 10 states and brought chaos to Caracas, drawing accusations of government incompetence from the opposition. …
Power Line says another demagogue is complaining about wreckers.
There is a disturbing undercurrent in Obama’s campaign-style speech on behalf of Obamacare at the EisenhowerExecutiveOfficeBuilding today. Obama never credits opponents of the law with the substance of their criticism. He does not attribute decent motives or good faith opposition to them. Rather, he treats them as “wreckers” (as they were deemed in the Soviet Union) guilty of destructive thought crime:
“Now, we may never satisfy the law’s opponents. I think that’s fair to say. Some of them are rooting for this law to fail — that’s not my opinion, by the way, they say it pretty explicitly. (Laughter.) Some have already convinced themselves that the law has failed, regardless of the evidence. But I would advise them to check with the people who are here today and the people that they represent all across the country whose lives have been changed for the better by the Affordable Care Act.”
Mr. President, We trump your beneficiaries with the millions of citizens whose lives have already been blighted by Obamacare!
And Power Line says the young are getting restless.
Just about the only good I could ever see in the election of Barack Obama was the near inevitability that the young voters who helped elect him would become disillusioned. These voters had been trending leftward so vigorously that more than just the slow aging process seemed necessary to reverse the movement. An Obama presidency always seemed likely to supply the “more.”
And so, finally, it has. From Ron Fournier of the National Journal:
Young Americans are turning against Barack Obama and Obamacare, according to a new survey of millennials, people between the ages of 18 and 29 who are vital to the fortunes of the president and his signature health care law.
The most startling finding of HarvardUniversity’s Institute of Politics: A majority of Americans under age 25–the youngest millennials–would favor throwing Obama out of office.
It looks like the young and the restless take their buyer’s remorse seriously.
But this is not the only striking finding of the Harvard survey: …
Peter Wehner says obama’s nothing but a community organizer after all.
… the president is betting that three weeks of his speeches, spin, and PR events will undo the damage; that his reassuring words and assault on the GOP will make up for his epic governing incompetence.
This is a delusional hope.
The problem Mr. Obama faces isn’t a communications failure; it’s a facts-on-the-ground failure. He is the author and architect of a perfectly awful law. A few clever lines delivered from an increasingly unpopular and discredited president won’t make any difference. The public is both turning on the president and tuning him out.
Americans are tired of Mr. Obama; and they are tired of the pain and trauma, the ineptness and dishonesty, of his presidency.
Maybe he was just a Chicago community organizer after all.
Jonathan Tobin doesn’t think a PR offensive will cure the healthcare bill.
Today the White House returns to what it does best. Unfortunately, that isn’t governing; it’s campaigning. So after two months of a disastrous ObamaCare rollout, instead of sitting down and figuring out the implications of a bill that still aren’t fully understood and why the healthcare.gov website is still not fully functional, the president is about to hit the road in full campaign mode to sell the country on the bill’s benefits and blaming all of its problems on Republicans. The point of this new push is public relations, not policy. The administration has been flummoxed by its inability to control the ObamaCare narrative after the website didn’t work and the nation discovered that the president’s promises about people keeping their insurance and doctors if they liked them proved to be a lie. So their answer is to go back to their strengths that won the 2012 election: captivating the nation with the magic of Obama’s personality and scapegoating the GOP.
Will it work? Anyone who underestimates the president’s still potent powers of persuasion is making a mistake. It’s also probably foolish to think that the mainstream media that has gone off the reservation in recent months won’t respond to Obama’s planned three-week-long dog-and-pony show as they always did before he was mired in a spate of second-term scandals and disasters. But the problem with the administration’s strategy is that recasting the ObamaCare narrative will require more than a good public-relations strategy. So long as the website doesn’t work, millions are losing their coverage and being faced with higher costs and with the implications of the new insurance landscape still a question for the majority of Americans who are covered by their employers, a few presidential speeches and events highlighting the minority that will undoubtedly benefit from the bill won’t change the narrative. …