Good news if true

Thomas Friedman is among the most egregious Iraq War cheerleaders/Bush apologists in the current punditocracy and as such, I generally take his Times column for a grain of salt. I mean really, if you are that wrong about the single biggest foreign policy decision of the last 20 years and then consistently make excuses for that misjudgment, how freaking credible can you be?

So with that caveat, his piece today on how Obama’s nomination has changed for the better the perception of America in the Muslim world is really quite heartening. Again, I am talking about Friedman, a man who possesses a pair of rose-colored glasses second to none, so this may be entirely bullshit. But if his observations are correct, then I find it reassuring that the Bush Years have not fucked up irredeemably our national reputation.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Democrats’ nomination of Obama as their candidate for president has done more to improve America’s image abroad — an image dented by the Iraq war, President Bush’s invocation of a post-9/11 “crusade,” Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and the xenophobic opposition to Dubai Ports World managing U.S. harbors — than the entire Bush public diplomacy effort for seven years.

[Snip]

Yes, all of this Obama-mania is excessive and will inevitably be punctured should he win the presidency and start making tough calls or big mistakes. For now, though, what it reveals is how much many foreigners, after all the acrimony of the Bush years, still hunger for the “idea of America” — this open, optimistic, and, indeed, revolutionary, place so radically different from their own societies.

In his history of 19th-century America, “What Hath God Wrought,” Daniel Walker Howe quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson as telling a meeting of the Mercantile Library Association in 1844 that “America is the country of the future. It is a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations.”

That’s the America that got swallowed by the war on terrorism. And it’s the America that many people want back. I have no idea whether Obama will win in November. Whether he does or doesn’t, though, the mere fact of his nomination has done something very important. We’ve surprised ourselves and surprised the world and, in so doing, reminded everyone that we are still a country of new beginnings.

And boy do we need a new beginning...