"none of March14's 'enthusiastic defenders'... are going to be effective with Obama"

Abu Muqawama, here

"....I find this whole thing really interesting for an entirely different reason. Whatever your position is on Lebanese politics, there can surely be little disagreement that March 14th was left wrong-footed by the U.S. presidential election. For several years, March 14th cultivated an enthusiastic group of defenders in the U.S. media and think tanks: Tony Badran, Lee Smith, David Schenker, and Michael Totten -- just to name a few. The problem was, almost all of these guys only have influence in a very narrow band along the ideological spectrum. Put another way, a favorable op-ed printed in the Weekly Standard carried a lot more weight in 2004 than it does today. And if you're looking to carry the March 14th message to policy-makers in Barack Obama's Washington, none of these guys are really going to be effective.

For the life of me, I have no idea why they weren't doing this in 2006 and 2007, when, after the mid-term elections, anyone with half a brain could see the way the political winds were starting to change in the U.S."