This article is an excellent demonstration of how hard—how really really hard—it is to change one’s political mind.
It’s written by Mitch Ginsburg, a man who appears to be some sort of military expert—at least, expert enough to work for The Times of Israel as military correspondent. He was a huge Obama supporter in 2008, with high hopes, so much so that he wrote letters to wavering relatives talking up how wonderful an Obama presidency would be:
I spoke about the horrors of the American prison system and the plague of racism that continue to rot America from the inside; I spoke about drugs and how only people of color are incarcerated for using and dealing them, while people like George W. Bush and every other person I knew in college was free to pull bong hits, take acid, and boil ”˜shrooms to his or her heart’s content. I think I spoke about African-American role models and education and gay rights.
Ginsburg did not think much of Sarah Palin. He felt that McCain was too old and too sick, and:
Something could happen to McCain. In walks the moose hunter.
And then there was Israel:
As for Israel, I said with all the authority I could muster, it didn’t really matter. No president has recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The United States believes in a two-state solution. The occupation of the West Bank and its subsequent settlement with civilians made sense historically, emotionally, but was a horrid piece of irony…
The article goes on to talk mainly about Obama’s foreign policy, most particularly his policy in the Middle East. Ginsburg describes how each step of the way, Obama’s actions as president slowly, very slowly chipped away at Ginsburg’s hopefulness and then even his equanimity about Obama. Despite certain warning signs that were pretty much ignored, it was really only Obama’s reaction to Egypt in 2012 (prior to the US election) that caused Ginsburg to experience the “first crack in my devotion,” when Obama seemed to be naively trusting the Muslim Brotherhood.
But Ginsburg was reluctant to see what was already so plain:
Still, though, I told myself, the president of the United States of America could not possibly believe that political Islam, as practiced by the Brotherhood, was a necessary stage on the path to true democracy.
That’s where the article got especially interesting to me, because Ginsburg is describing something that happens to a lot of people when their previous beliefs are challenged, which is that they cling to those beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary rather than face the dual pain of realizing they had been wrong and comprehending that they’ve been betrayed by someone they had trusted. The first is a blow to the ego, the second a blow to the sense of safety. The first engenders guilt and/or shame, the second anger, doubt, and fear.
Not very pleasant, to be sure. Much easier to shake it all off and say no, it can’t be that way. And that’s exactly what Ginsburg did, because he voted for Obama again in 2012.
This is how he describes that vote:
In November, with no fanfare and…with dwindling conviction, I voted for him again. I believed Obama when he told Goldberg that, insofar as the military option against Iran in concerned, “as president of the United States, I don’t bluff.”
That lackluster, hope-against-hope vote can only be understood in terms of “hope dies hard.” Ginsburg doesn’t explain it any further. Did he even look at Romney (a non-moose hunter), who was saying all the right things about foreign policy? Did Ginsburg even give Romney a moment of serious thought, or did he dismiss the evil Republican out of hand? It is impossible to know, but that’s my guess—“binders of women” and all that.
The rest of Ginsburg’s article is a long list of the bad things that Obama has done in the Middle East since then, “a flurry of events [that] turned my waning and rather lonely support of the president into a clammy and bewildering sense of betrayal.” Aha! “Clammy” usually means sweaty palms, clammy with fear. “Bewildering”—he’s confused, puzzled, and having trouble processing what’s happening. But the all-important word is “betrayal.” Ginsburg feels lied to, and indeed he was.
But it took Obama doing something especially egregious—actually, a series of egregious lies and false promises that constitute betrayals—to get Ginsburg to say the word and to feel in his gut what it actually means. And even now, Ginsburg backtracks a little and says that maybe, just maybe Obama’s “soft power” approach will end up “prevail[ing] before the regime pushes toward the bomb.” Having just listed a host of things that are wrong with that approach, he doesn’t really try to explain why or how that better result might occur. But he clings to that remnant of hope.
Ginsburg ends the piece with a statement that in 2016 he won’t be writing any more letters “imploring” people to vote (he doesn’t say for whom, but I assume he means for the Democrat and not the Republican). But he stops short of saying he’s considering voting for a Republican himself. If I had to lay money on it, I’d say he won’t; at this point he still can’t. Eight years of Obama and he’s barely halfway there.
That’s how difficult a mind is to change.
