Flashback: The day I am inaugurated Middle East tensions will subside

On November 23, 2007, then candidate Barack Obama made a bold prediction about himself and how his mere election to the nation’s highest office would ease tensions in the Middle East. No doubt, many Americans believed him and many others optimistically hoped he was right. However, the events of the past week prove that Obama was wrong and that his prediction was just more self-aggrandizing blather. Obama can’t change the level of the sea, he can’t fix the deficit or the economy, and can’t ease tensions in the Middle East.

Here is what Obama said in 2007:

“I truly believe that the day I’m inaugurated not only does the country look at itself differently, but the whole world looks at America differently.

“If I’m reaching out to the Muslim world they understand that I’ve lived in a Muslim country, and I may be a Christian, but I understand their point of view.

“My sister is half Indonesian. I traveled there all the way through my college years so I am intimately concerned with what happens in these countries and the cultures and perspectives these folks have.

“And these are powerful tools for us to be able to reach out to the world, and when you combine that with my work on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on everything from immigration to issues of genocide, then I think the world will have confidence that I am listening to them and that our future and our security is (sic) tied up with our ability to work with other countries of the world.

“And that will ultimately make us safer. And that’s something that this administration [Bush] has failed to understand.”

So now the cold hard reality sets in. The Middle East is less stable under Obama. It is less peaceful. More people suffer under greater tyranny than before. American embassies are under attack. Four American diplomats were murdered. Team Obama was more interested incondemning an obscure video on YouTube than the violence against our embassies. Then team Obama shifted its focus and seemed more focused on condemning Mitt Romney for criticizing the State Department’s apologies for a YouTube video than condemning the murder of our diplomats.

Obama’s policies and ineptitude have contributed to the current melt down in the Middle East. Obama’s foreign policy has been no more successful or effective than Jimmy Carter’s. In fact, Obama seems more lost than Carter. The sad state of the US economy bears powerful witness of the fact that Obama’s economic policies have failed. Even his own Fed Charman essentially said this week with the announcement of more “quantitative easing” tha there has been no recovery and that we are not likely to see one. But the complete meltdown of the Middle East and the slaying of our diplomats and the attacks on our embassies is even more dramatic evidence that Obama is also a failed foreign policy president.

Preaching class envy does nothing to build a strong economy. Projecting weakness does nothing to make the World or Americans more secure. To be successful in a second term, Obama would have to reject virtually everything he’s done throughout his political career. Sadly, he tells us he needs more time to do the exact same things he has been doing. That is a recipe for disaster.