A decided height advantage seemed to force President Obama to bend over slightly when he shook hands with the much shorter Raul Castro earlier this month. But Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady isn’t quite sure. Writing in her column Sunday, O’Grady speculated that Obama was actually showing reverence to the Cuban president.
“Did Barack Obama bow to Raúl Castro when the two shook hands at a memorial for Nelson Mandela in South Africa earlier this month?” O’Grady wrote in a piece that focused on discrimination against black Cubans. “It sure looked that way in a South African Broadcasting Corporation photo.”
But after tossing the red meat to conservatives, O’Grady acknowledged the size disparity.
“On the other hand Castro is a diminutive dictator. That may explain what seemed to be presidential stooping to the level of the tropical totalitarian. Let’s hope so,” she wrote.
The handshake immediately called to mind Obama’s apparent bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, a gesture for which the President was sharply maligned by Republicans (even though George W. Bush showed plenty of affection to the Saudi king as well). For what it’s worth, the White House claimed that Obama’s purported bow to King Abdullah was also the result of a height advantage.
Obama took some heat from conservatives for his handshake with Castro, too. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) wondered why Obama didn’t lecture Castro about Cuba’s human rights violations, while Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) compared the gesture to Neville Chamberlain’s handshake with Adolf Hitler.
Bow or no bow? You be the judge.
