Obama kept his cool after the Paris attacks. Too bad his critics haven't

Trevor Timm

Judging by the range of irrational responses to the Paris attacks, you’d think we have learned absolutely nothing from the last 14 years of constant war and destruction in the Middle East. Worse, the president is one of the few people being somewhat rational about the whole situation – and he is receiving nothing but criticism for it.

Fear is now the number-one commodity for politicians and federal agencies alike: the CIA and FBI are full CYA mode, scaring the American public by claiming the next attack is inevitable and blaming technology for their own failures. The State Department issued the vaguest possible “worldwide” travel alert possible on Monday, saying Americans should be on edge about the entire globe, with “terrorist groups continue[ing] to plan terrorist attacks in multiple regions”.

On the Republican side, Chris Christie is supposedly gaining ground in the Republican primary specifically by invoking 9/11 and the fear surrounding it. Donald Trump is stoking xenophobic rage, and his fellow Republican candidates are dutifully and embarrassingly following his lead. Americans are suddenly terrified of terrorists despite the fact that you have roughly the same chance of dying from a terrorist attack as you do being crushed to death by falling furniture.

Cable television and pundits are doing their best to fuel the flames: questions to the president fromCNN’s Jim Acosta like, “why can’t we take out these bastards?” – as if there was some magic solution the White House has been sitting on but refuses to implement. Others seem to be pretending that we haven’t spent the last year dropping thousands of bombs per month on Isis (by the way, I’m still waiting for a journalist to ask whether more bombing only increases the chance of a terrorist attack, as it almost certainly does).

Still others claim that if only Obama would call Isis “radical Islamic jihadists” rather than referring to them as simply “terrorists,” then we’d be on our way to victory. All the Republicans who continually rip Obama for not using that phrase seem to forget it was the George W Bush administration whobanned it from the government’s lexicon because it was clearly counterproductive and sparked Muslims to turn against the US.

In the polls, the president is getting crushed. The Washington Post noted that “the public’s ratings of Obama on dealing with terrorism have fallen to a record-low 40 percent, with a smaller 35 percent approving of his handling of the Islamic State.”

If Obama is taking a hit for his calm and rational rhetoric, then that’s a shame, because he’s actually the only one responding the way he should: by not elevating Isis to the status its members crave. “The most powerful tool we have to fight Isil is to say that we’re not afraid, to not elevate them, to not buy into their fantasy that they’re doing something important,” Obama said the other day. “They are a bunch of killers with good social media.”

He was criticized for the remark, but he’s exactly right. We often elevate these terrorists as “masterminds” and present them as grand warriors who we must upend our lives and our values to go to all-out war to stop. Obama’s getting ripped for approaching this like a “law professor”, but after decades of approaching this emotionally and ending in disaster, maybe a little logic is in order.

He has spent much of the past week defending refugees and hitting back at Republicans for talking “tough” while being afraid of Syrian orphans. For that, he is criticized as debasing the office of the presidency by “trolling” Republicans who are down in the polls. No, he is speaking to a large portion of the electorate who apparently have the same xenophobic feelings.

I, for one, am glad President Obama seems to be the only one not spinning out of control and becoming unhinged because of a single horrific terrorist attack. Unfortunately, given the swell of emotion, is it only a matter of time before he succumbs too?