The First Seven Days

I promised Erin the day of the inauguration that I would refrain from making any negative comments about Obama until at least 100 days had passed. At the time I expected this period of self-imposed silence to be a teeth-gritting, hand-wringing sort of affair. I imagined sitting in front of the keyboard, vein throbbing in my head, willing my fingers not to smash out a bitter screed of betrayal and dashed dreams. Much to my pleasant surprise, this has not been the case. Yes, I know it’s only been seven days, but the ability of a politician to keep his promises and tell the truth usually has a half-life measured in hours, not days. Consequently, there is reason to hope that the next 93 days will be as filled with fresh-baked cookies and hot chocolate as these first seven were.

Obama’s first week in office has been such a clear repudiation of the Bush years that one scarcely knows where to begin. Let’s begin with this, a partial transcript from an interview-the first of his presidency- Obama sat for with Al Arabiya:

“I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries….[t]he largest one, Indonesia. And so what I want to communicate is the fact that in all my travels throughout the Muslim world, what I've come to understand is that regardless of your faith – and America is a country of Muslims, Jews, Christians, non-believers – regardless of your faith, people all have certain common hopes and common dreams.

And my job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives. My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy. We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect. But if you look at the track record, as you say, America was not born as a colonial power, and that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there's no reason why we can't restore that. And that I think is going to be an important task.”

Quite a sea change, isn’t it? Contrast that with the Bush administration’s paranoia and inability to draw fine distinctions between terrorists and, well, anyone else. Quite refreshing. In the same interview, the President acknowledges that the tone of a conversation is just as important as its content-something else lost on our last president:

“[T]he language we use matters. And what we need to understand is, is that there are extremist organizations – whether Muslim or any other faith in the past – that will use faith as a justification for violence. We cannot paint with a broad brush a faith as a consequence of the violence that is done in that faith's name.”

Obama has more faith in religion than I, but the point that we, as a country, will use our collective intellect to discern intent from context is something I can get behind 100%.