On June 2, 2008 TIME Magazine published a photo it had taken of the “lucky charms” Barack Obama carried with him. Among them was a miniature statue of a Hindu monkey god named Lord Hanuman. Once word got back to India that the evenutal Democratic nominee for President of the United States revered Hanuman, religious leaders had a two foot, gold-plated statue of the idol constructed, sanctified, and sent to Obama to arrive one day before the Democratic National Convention in August.
In the more than two years since then, Obama’s luck has diminished significantly. Coincidentally or not, the president’s junket to India, Indonesia, South Korea, and Japan got him out of Dodge hours after his party had taken a political paddling the likes of which hasn’t been seen in many decades. Perhaps even more interesting was the timing of his trip from a Hindu perspective. Just two days before his arrival in India, the world’s tallest statue of Lord Hanuman – 108 ft – was unveiled in Shimla.
If Obama received any luck from the much larger version of the two statues already in his possession, it didn’t seem to join him on his trip to Seoul, South Korea for a meeting with the G20 after leaving India and Indonesia. While in Seoul, his attempts to get the home country to open up trade with the United States failed. So too did his effort to get other nations to join him in chastising China for currency manipulation. The audacity of such a request in light of the very recent decision by the Federal Reserve to monetize U.S. debt to the tune of some $600 billion was lost on very few.
He was a weakened president on an international stage. Perhaps his diminished stature is an unintended consequence of his own policies, which have made the nation he leads, weaker in the world. Did he think the world would reward him for that? When abroad, he apologizes for America and rejects our exceptionalism. He doesn’t like this country very much, perhaps even hates it. His rhetoric has consistently told the world America is no longer special, nor should it be. If his trip to Asia should tell him anything, it should tell him that as America weakens, so does he.
Obama loves to be revered, paid attention to, and followed. He loves adoring crowds. Whether he knows it or not, his attempts to knock the United States down to size have severely limited his own ability to have those things. If he thought that by diminishing America’s stature in the world he would elevate himself because of some perceived overwhelming hatred of America internationally, he was mistaken. The treatment he received in Seoul underscores the point. Unfortunately, for the rest of us, so too is nearly every American weakened.
There also seems to be an inverse relationship between the diminished stature of Barack Obama and that of the latest version of Lord Hanuman.