Some very early reaction (more to follow). Yglesias:
This is a guy who’s not afraid to try to express complicated or difficult ideas...his
whole team is clearly imbued with the same spirit and that same mandate
to try to really explain
the complicated and difficult ideas rather than sweep them under the
rug. This seems connected to me to the remarkable way in which this
speech is being pushed out in multiple mediaon television, but also on
Twitter and on Facebook and via SMS and all in multiple languagesto a
global audience. Part of the rise of Obama is the rise of a
post-television, post-sound bite technological paradigm. You can
deliver a speech at 7 AM Eastern Time and know that even though
relatively few Americans will be up to see it, anyone who’s interested
will be able to Google up a transcript...It creates a whole new world
from one
in which the point of a speech is just to field test a couple of
zingers in hopes that one or two of them gets picked up for the evening
news.
Yaacov Lozowick, in Israel:
A wise Israeli Prime Minster such as we don't have, would have gone on
air two minutes after Obama's speech and said "As the elected leader of
Israel and foremost political figure in the Jewish world, I welcome
President Obama's speech wholeheartedly. He speaks for us, too, in our
joint aspirations for peace dignity freedom and well-being in the
Middle East and everywhere. We will do whatever we can to assist him in
realizing his fine vision". Let the Arabs wriggle and squirm.
Why should we be defensive after such a positive speech? Of course much
of what he asked for will never happen. Let the enemies of the vision
stand forth and reject it. How did we paint ourselves into their camp?
Stephen Hayes:
In a speech about freedom and democracy, America and Islam, Obama
glides right past the most remarkable development in the region in
decades: "Iraq's democratically-elected government." He mentions it
only in passing, to note that he's keeping his campaign promised to
remove troops...the fact that he can even
use that phrase -- Iraq's democratically-elected government -- might
have caused him to acknowledge that America's intervention there,
despite the tremendous difficulties, has made Iraq a country that
practices many of those things that he seeks for the rest of the region.
Fallows:
This was yet another in the series of speeches that individually and as a group really are out of phase with anything we have known in contemporary political rhetoric. I mean a sequence that began most noticeably with the "race and America" speech in Philadelphia 15 months ago and has continued with five or six clear high points since then (most recently at Notre Dame, as discussed
here) and no obvious flop.
The Economist:
[T]he constant refrain, heard on Cairo’s streets as well as from media
pundits, is that Arabs and Muslims would like to see Mr Obama’s words
matched by deeds. “To win our hearts, you must win our minds first, and
our minds are set on the protection of our interests,” declared one of
the reams of editorials, columns and open letters from across the
region.
Alex Massie:
[A]s the President said, a speech is just a speech. But that doesn't mean
it is only a speech. Obama's ambition was to speak to Muslims all
around the world, not just to dictators and princes and emirs. The
existence of the speech was probably more important than anything Obama
actually said - most of which will be just as perishable as most
speeches. But the image of th American president in Cairo may endure
rather longer. Who knows how much it can achieve?
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2009/06/the-cairo-pivot-reactions/200981/
