Mark Kleiman agrees this is a boon for an Obama Presidency, while James Joyner dissents:
I disagree strongly with Kerrey and Kleiman about the value of having a president with a Muslim middle name. Indeed, the idea that religious nuts who are willing to murder thousands of Americans would think “Hey, they elected a guy with a Muslim middle name! They must be okay!” is absurd. Hell, they kill plenty of people named Hussein who actually are Muslims; the only thing they hate more than American infidels is Arab apostates.
But as Kevin Drum rejoins, the benefit of Barack Hussein Obama isn't that the hardcore jihadists will suddenly see the error of their ways. It's that he has a great potential to peel off support from the rest of the Arab World (also, is Obama even of Arab ancestry? His father was from Kenya -- not an Arab state, though he still could be ethnically Arab).
Kleiman also points out that Obama's race could be a disadvantage, given the intense amount of anti-Black prejudice in the Arab World. I think that likely won't be a factor -- and certainly will be outweighed by the boon the "Obama image" would bring in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere throughout the globe.
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The idea that any of our PR, "hearts and minds" stuff is directed toward people who have been fully brainwashed into hating America is ludicrous. Conservatives usually grasp the concept of the marginal actor, the person whose decision is shifted by a police.
(E.g., the relative rare person who holds the kind of job where he decides how many hours he works, and who is highly attentive to his income and deductions, genuinely may decide to work less if another hour of work would put him into a higher tax bracket. That this person included Ronald Reagan as an actor -- actors being able to choose their projects -- and not Bill Bradley as an NBA player -- who gets paid for showing up to every game, not picking and choosing which he wants -- is basically the story of the '86 tax reform.)
Anyway, just as our decision to torture or not torture isn't going to change the way hardcore terrorists treat captives, having a person of color with Muslim ancestry isn't going to change how hardcore terrorists think of America. But both torture and a very white face of the U.S. do affect how the people on the margin think of America.
Islamic terrorism isn't just among Arabs; it's also on the rise in Africa. (Remember where bin Laden was hanging out before Afghanistan, and which government was found liable for the attack on the USS Cole?) If Muslim Africans can look at America and see a face that looks something like their own, this is something to make the U.S. look less like The Other and more like themselves.
Andrew Sullivan's otherwise idiotic article makes this point:
"What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. It could be an effective potential rebranding of the United States. Such a rebranding is not trivial - it’s central to an effective war strategy. The war on Islamist terror, after all, is two-pronged: a function of both hard power and soft power. We have seen the potential of hard power in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. We have also seen its inherent weaknesses in Iraq, and its profound limitations in winning a long war against radical Islam. The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an ideological template that works to the West’s advantage over the long haul. There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this.
"Consider this hypothetical scenario. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man - Barack Hussein Obama – is the new face of America. In one simple image America’s soft power has been ratcheted up exponentially. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonisation of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about America in ways no words can. "
Is the antichrist here yet?
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