Foreign correspondents in Washington know there's little they can hope to get from a candidate running for the Presidency. At best they'll be tolerated, at worst abused and patronised. Obama is not on the campaign trail any longer but his press strategy does not seem to have switched to governing mode yet.
Indeed, for a President who wants to "renew" America's relationship with the rest of the world, Obama is strikingly reluctant to actually, you know, speak to the rest of the world. When he embarked on his tour of europe last summer he failed to take a single foreign journalist with him; nor did he grant any interviews while he was in Britain, not even to the BBC. That pattern has largely continued now thta he's in office.
No doubt there is time for all this to be straightened out, but one has to notice how catch-as-catch-can foreign policy is these days. Bush was, of course, bad at this, too, but at least one had the sense that he had a plan, even if that plan was too simplistic or wrong. Consider today's revelation about the secret letter to Russia. When, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Russians want to put U.S. missiles in Turkey up for negotiation, Kennedy rejects it outright (while secretly signalling, not quite promising, that the missiles will be removed a discreet time after Russia removes them from Cuba)--but the secret part of the negotiation moves the whole process forward. Obama's move appears to be an offer unsolicited by Russia, which makes me wonder exactly what is supposedly going on.
No comments:
Post a Comment