Guy Aitchison (London, OK): In his calculated endorsement of Barack Obama in the Telegraph last week, Boris Johnson felt a clear need to justify to his readers how he had come to reach a conclusion different to that of the great sage on all things America and the West: Melanie Phillips. The Mayor does "revere" the Speccie columist and author of Londonistan, you see, and has "carefully studied her blog entires about Obama", but in the end he just couldn't buy into the idea that the next likely President of the US is a "Marxist subversive loony Lefty" on the basis of whatever tenuous associations he once held.
It is perhaps reassuring to know that the mayor of a city as international and diverse as London is unconvinced by some of the wilder more racially-charged smears coming out of the GOP. But in the neo-con world inhabited by Johnson's former colleagues at the Speccie (not to mention his current colleagues at City Hall) Phillip's clash of civilizations narrative, in which Obama plays the role of appeaser, still carries influence. That is why it is helpful to have Kanishk's Tharoor's calm measured demolition of Phillips in openUSA.
According to Phillips, Obama is the epitome of the guilt-ridden, multicultural self-hater. His inevitable failures as president would not only be those of diplomatic compromise, but of cultural and historical surrender. Overreaching minorities will be coddled within their obliging societies. Terrorists will become objects of politically-correct sympathy. Iraq and Afghanistan will be evacuated. Israel will be sacrificed to the Arabs. Obama will strip the US - and ultimately, the "West" - of the right to assert its identity and strength. Under an Obama presidency, there will be no safe buffer zone - political and psychological - between the west and the rest.
As Kanishk writes, Phillips has no real interest in looking seriously at Obama, "She only wants him to be a woodcut in her shadow world of demons and angels." Projecting on to the Presidential election her own vision of a world divided between good and evil, Phillips fails to see the true significance of the Obama phenomenon. Take a look at Kanisk's post to find out why.
PS - If Obama is a demon in Phillips's worldview, what on earth does that make Ralph Nader!? He's running again this year and I have blogged on him over at openUSA.
