The remarkable clarifying powers of Obama

Hotair ^ | May 21,2011 | J.E. Dyer

[Hojczyk]

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an international issue clarified in as little time as the 26 hours or so it took to get from “1967 lines” to “No way.” And we have President Obama to thank for it.

In all the discussion of how he was schooled and taken to the woodshed by Prime Minister Netanyahu, there has been little recognition of the fact that Bibi had no choice but to say what he did in the press conference on Friday.

Obama isn’t the first American president to give short shrift to the fundamentals of negotiation; most of our presidents know little about it. As a superpower, we are essentially a continent-size island with only two land borders, and our chief executive is his own separate branch of government, intended to counterbalance the legislature rather than emerging from it after years of parliamentary sausage-making. It is rare for our presidents to enter the office with any meaningful experience in negotiation, and even rarer for them to appreciate it as a political discipline and be good at it.

But I don’t know that we’ve ever had a president who seemed, as much as Obama does, to live in a galaxy far, far away from “negotiation,” the human concept. It’s not that he appears to dismiss the ramifications of his actions for ongoing negotiations; it’s that they don’t even seem to occur to him. In one of the most counterintuitive episodes in a long time, it took an attitude this blunderingly dysfunctional to corner the consummate statesman Benjamin Netanyahu and induce him to say, bluntly and unequivocally, what had to be said about Israel’s irreducible requirements for survival.

[Raycpa]

I'm guessing that no one at the State Dept., or even Hillary, actually knew what the boy wonder was going to say until a few hours before the speech.

Its not possible Hillary set him up?

[BobP]

The reality is Palestinians don't want a separate state, they want the place currently known as Israel. They don't want to live in peace but to take over what the Jews worked so hard to build since Israel's conception. Obama, it seems, is all for it too.

[Mike Darancette]

It’s not like everyone in the world pretty much knew what Obama was going to say in regards to the 1967 line or what the Israeli response would be. So either none of his foreign policy geniuses (including Ms. Clinton) said nothing or the moron decided to say it anyway.

[Just mythoughts]

Given all that has happened since BamBamKennedy got ‘trumped’, Bam’s head has NOT stopped bobbling. No way Hillry did not know what Benjamin Netanyahu's reaction and response was going to be. And the lefty's reaction is whining about Netanyahu dissing the prez. I think there needs to be some ‘peace’ negotiations within this administration.