On Obama's Speech to the United Nations: A Collection of Conservative and Liberal Reactions

Listening in on both conservative and liberal reaction to the president's speech (NRO editors called it his "confession"). 

Here's a smattering of commentary from the "right"...

Victor Davis Hanson (National Review Online)

The key question is at what point will the American people sense that the Obama feel-good magic comes at the expense of long-term American interests — and that making some unsavory characters like our president now will mean only trouble ahead for the country itself and its friends abroad.

Charles Krauthammer (blog)

This speech hovered somewhere between embarrassing and dangerous. You had a president of the United States actually saying: “No [one] nation can or should try to dominate another.” I will buy the "should try to" as kind of adolescent wishful thinking. But “no [one] nation can dominate another”? What planet is he living on? It is the story of man. What does he think Russia is doing to Georgia?

Obama's speech is alarming because it says the United States has no more moral right to act or to influence world history than Bangladesh or Sierra Leone. It diminishes the United States deliberately and wants to say that we should be one nation among others, and not defend the alliance of democracies that we have in NATO, for example, or to say — as [did] every president who goes before Obama — that we stand for something good and unique in the world.

Anne Bayefsky (senior fellow with the Hudson Institute and executive director of Human Rights Voices) reporting from the U.N.:

President Obama had the audacity to speak at length about his commitment to standing with the oppressed. While he spoke inside the U.N., hundreds of protesters from Iran were outside refuting his words...President Obama has offered an outstretched hand to the man who is responsible for the terrible fate of Iranian dissidents. Every Iranian demonstrator in New York today said loud and clear that they believe President Obama’s policy on Iran to be an outrageous abandonment of democratic values....Instead of leading, the president sounded confused and relativistic....The president’s deliberate ambiguity on the nature of democracy was well-received at the U.N., but it did nothing to enhance America’s moral stature and leadership capacity in the world today. ...This speech ought to send shockwaves through the United States and our European allies. We have the weakest president in modern times ensconced in Washington, a man who will run away from saying what has to be said, if it doesn’t appeal to an audience rife with demagogues.

Rich Lowry (excerpts from his column in the New York Post)

President Obama yesterday did his best impression of a high-school sophomore participating in his first Model UN meeting… Obama hopes that all our self-effacing niceness will catalyze the world into ending its "bickering about outdated grievances." No wonder he twice had to deny that he was being naive.

And from the "left..."

The New York Times editorial board, taking the requisite swipe at George W. Bush, writes that Obama “took another step toward repairing America’s battered image,” while the Los Angeles Times focused mostly on the power of Obama’s personality. Commending Obama for his ability to “palpably reduce global tensions,” the L.A. Times wrote that “some delegates were so awed by the American president that they couldn't resist snapping pictures during his Wednesday speech.”

 Michael Crowley, writing in his column in The New Republic, is a bit more circumspect, calling the speech “elegant if not terribly profound” and “idealistic,” and concluding that “it is the force of Obama's identity and personal experience which offers some hope that his words might have more resonance.” Yet his final statement (“In the months to come, we’ll find out”) suggests he seems willing to reserve judgment.

Comparing these contrasting views, one can’t help but feel commentary today is all about perceptions, expectations, and preferences and not necessarily about actual facts. These divergent views aren’t coming from the fringes. These are thoughtful, informed, intelligent comments about the exact same event but with widely different assessments and conclusions. Is it even possible to get at actual truth anymore, or will it always be that opinions and ideas are shaped by whose “side” we’re on?