Last week on Meet the Press, Chuck Todd reported that administration officials were "frustrated that they're not getting credit for what's going on in Iran.…they think that Cairo speech did help supporters of Mousavi sort of see light at the end of the tunnel in their country." As Jonah Goldberg noted, that idea spread to the pages of the Washington Post by Tuesday, in this report:
But privately Obama advisers are crediting his Cairo speech for inspiring the protesters, especially the young ones, who are now posing the most direct challenge to the republic's Islamic authority in its 30-year history.
Today, speaking to a group of Washington reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel reinforced that argument by declaring that Obama's speech in Cairo "will go down as one of the most significant foreign policy speeches." "It was equal to what Kennedy's speech was, what Reagan's speech was," he said. "I think he did 20 years worth of work...for advancing America's interests...We are no longer the issue in that region of the world." He went on to cite several recent Middle Eastern political events as evidence that Obama's approach was bearing fruit. He mentioned elections in Lebanon, which gave the Western-backed March 14 coalition a majority of seats in the parliament there. He cited a February vote in Iraq (Obama was apparently able to affect that with the mere mulling of a speech to the "Muslim world."), which rewarded Maliki's crackdowns on militias and rejected Iran-aligned religious candidates. He cited Kuwaiti elections, which gave seats to women while taking seats from Islamists.Then, onto Iran: "Or, you look at Iran: the moderate voices of reform that are willing to accept some kind of engagement in modernity are winning, and the extremists are back on their heels," Emanuel said. "It's not just one speech, but it's a series of policies." That Obama. He's something else.