Editorial: Live from Chicago -- so far, so good

Issue of Dec. 12, 2008 / 15 Kislev 5769

President-elect Barack Obama is mostly doing and saying the right things as he transitions into the beginning of his presidency, and that is a relief.

It's no secret to regular readers that Mr. Obama's opponent was endorsed on this page, in part because we felt that a one-term senator was unready for the presidency, and in part because his stated inclinations, particularly concerning foreign policy, worried us a great deal.

Other Obama critics expressed their concern with over-the-top rhetoric, vitriol and hateful, even racist, invective, including trumped-up accusations of treason and other malfeasance. Some people still have not let go to the point where you wonder if, now that he's about to become President, they're actually rooting for him to fail.

Just this week the Supreme Court dealt a blow to some of those persistent critics. The justices refused to hear a case detailing the supposed ineligibility of Mr. Obama to be president by dint of his supposedly foreign citizenship at birth.

We have no illusions that we're going to like every step the future Obama administration may take, nor are we thrilled about absolutely every thing that's happened thus far. For instance, we don't see how a Secretary of State named Hillary Clinton poses any sort of good news for Israel (with apologies to those who are still hyperventilating with excitement).

But in the big picture, without a doubt, the President-elect has struck just the right balance in his public statements of competence and confidence leavened with realism about the economic challenges we face, and about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and he has made some excellent appointments.

Perhaps most gratifying, however, is that with the campaign behind him, President-elect Obama seems to have woken up and smelled the coffee concerning the threat that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose to the United States, to Israel, and to the entire world.

On “Meet the Press” last Sunday, the President-elect maintained his hope that diplomacy might still save the day, but there was no hint of his oft-ridiculed suggestion that he would meet face to face with Iran's leaders without preconditions. Instead Mr. Obama said that diplomatic efforts toward a resolution should make it “very clear to them that their development of nuclear weapons would be unacceptable, that their funding of terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, their threats against Israel, are contrary to everything that we believe in and what the international community should accept, and present a set of carrots and sticks, in changing their calculus about how they want to operate.”

He went on to say that it would be necessary to build a coalition with nations that currently do business with Iran in order to enforce sanctions and foil the threat, and ultimately, allow Iran to decide, “whether they want to do this the hard way or the easy way.”

Considering Mr. Obama's earlier, naïve, policy on Iran, those are very welcome words.