The Obama Effect

Those who accuse him of "weakness" are living in past paradigms. And little wonder, since most of them grew up in a different paradigm. But soft power matters as much as hard power in promoting US interests and values. And on that score, the promise of Obama's election (that I argued for here) is being fulfilled:

Ezra notes:

In 2007, the world preferred the bureaucrats running the authoritarian Chinese government to the people in charge of the American government. Today, they don’t. In fact, they don’t prefer the leadership of any major power to ours.

That kind of American exceptionalism - based on reality, not theological myth - is the kind of exceptionalism we should be cheering on.