I'm sitting and watching President Obama's speech on the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. He is eloquent as usual, giving compelling visuals of the protestors demanding a free government amid personal peril. He is quoting Gandhi and Martin Luther King. But say what he will, for Obama it's too late. The leader of the free world simply refused to lead. President Obama watched the events unfold in Egypt just as you and I did. He was afraid to push, afraid to nudge, afraid to call for the autocrat Mubarak to immediate resign from his illegitimate perch. Obama reacted, the people of Egypt led. America as symbol of global freedom has been significantly diminished as a result.
Obama was supposed to be a transformational president. An African-American had risen to the highest office in the land and the most powerful post on earth. Surely, even more than President George W. Bush -- a son of privilege and wealth -- he would emerge as a champion of freedom and democracy. Surely such unmatched eloquence would be employed in the cause of human liberty.
But we were all given pause when Obama, in the first months of his presidency, embraced dictator Hugo Chavez with a wide grin and bowed to the tyrant-king of Saudi Arabia. Chavez had called George Bush 'the devil' from the rostrum of the United Nations and has singled-handedly dismantled democracy in Venezuela, throwing his political opponents in jail. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia presides over a regime so ruthless that women are imprisoned and lashed simply for being in a closed space with a man who is not their husband and can't even drive a car. Perhaps these were just glitches. Perhaps Obama really did have a freedom agenda tucked away that he would finally pull out.
But from there it only got worse, with Obama's foreign policy repudiating most of President Bush's democracy-building gestures and opting instead for Kissingerian realpolitik, with America prepared to do business with almost any kind of dictator so long as it served our interests. Obama even won a Nobel Peace Prize simply for not being George Bush. We thought Obama's lauding of tyrants reached its zenith with Obama holding only his second State dinner last month to honor the President of China, one of the most oppressive regimes on earth. It's one thing to do business with China. But to honor its brutal leadership?
Now with Egypt the circle is complete. Four hundred million Arabs live under brutal tyranny with barely any freedoms. Egypt is the Arab world's most populous state. A gift was handed to Obama -- who has done next-to-nothing for imprisoned people around the world -- when the citizens of Tunisia and Egypt began agitating for their liberty. It received one line in Obama's state of the Union address. And even as the Egyptian people showed they were ready to endure almost any hardship to be free, our President simply watched to see what would happen, got it wrong repeatedly, and suddenly found his voice when it was all over.
You would think that the President of the United States would have given a speech, when the demonstrations first started, declaring, "The people of Egypt, sovereign in their own land, are demanding the immediate resignation of a President who has presided unlawfully over them for three decades and brutally suppressed political dissent. The people of the United States and their President stand squarely with our brothers and sisters in Egypt and demand Mubarak's immediate compliance." Instead, we got all this confusing talk from Obama and Hillary Clinton about how the transition to democracy could be messy and Mubarak needed time. Time? Three decades isn't' enough? And if you give a dictator a finger, he takes the whole hand. He wasn't going anywhere. He had to leave now.
So here we are. The greatest democracy on earth, led by a man whose rhetoric and actions on freedom are in conflict. If Obama really believed that it wasn't wise for Mubarak to leave immediately, then why didn't he say it today after Mubarak's resignation? Rather than invoking Gandhi and Martin Luther King, he should have invoked the French revolution, Iran, and Hamas, showing the perils of democracy.
The reason he didn't is that when it comes to promoting democracy Obama is a profoundly weak leader, forever afraid to take a stand, oddly bereft of strong personal convictions on human liberty and freedom, believing to his core that while people deserve to be free, only a super-strong government who does most of the work for them can guarantee their freedom.
Thank G-d the brave people of Egypt have rejected our President's empty rhetoric of hope and change.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, writer and broadcaster, was the London Times Preacher of the Year. His most recent book is 'Renewal: A Guide to the Values-Filled Life.' Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.