Brilliant idea. Whether you like 'em or not, Muslims make up between 1 and 1.8 billion of the world's 6.6 billion people. It would be nice if more of them had a better opinion of us. Obama is uniquely positioned - particularly because of the secret-Muslim slurs against him - to reach out to the Muslim world. Starting with, apparently, Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country. Ben Smith reports:
Barack Obama told a group of donors in California early last year that his first international trip would be to Muslim Indonesia, a supporter who was present recalled today....It says, the long national nightmare may finally be over.
As Leary notes, there's a logic to an Indonesia trip: It's giant, Muslim, democratic -- and a place Obama lived as a child.
He said Obama told donors to “imagine if on January 20, 2009 a guy named Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in on the US Capitol steps as the President of the United States, what that would say to the world, especially the Muslim world, about our nation.”
