Are the winds of change really blowing for Obama?

As the first anniversary of Obama’s election approaches, the US is in wait-and-see mode, with the euphoria surrounding his victory clouded by his perceived lack of progress on troops and on Guantánamo

ON THE EVENING of November 4th, 2008, television crews pre-positioned themselves in party headquarters to transmit standard election night fare. But the real story was in neighbourhoods across the country, as millions of Americans gathered in the streets to celebrate the election of Barack Obama, 44th president of the United States of America.

“It busted the red-blue divide in the US,” says Alabama-born Scott Lucas, the founder of the Enduring America website and a professor of US politics at the University of Birmingham in Britain. “For that night, and again at the inauguration, the polarity seemed to have ended. It was such a huge occasion; the idea that an African-American, and someone who was relatively unknown, could become president. By the end of the Bush presidency, the Iraq war and the economic downturn had taken the stuffing out of the country. Here was something you could hang on to.”

Albert Hunt, a prominent political commentator who is head of the Bloomberg news agency in Washington, remembers leaving his office near the White House at 3am to find the streets filled with people. “It seemed like a hugely momentous event,” Hunt recalls. “It did to most people, no matter what their views were. A lot of American history flashed before us. It was a celebration, but it wasn’t raucous, just happy.”

Inevitably, the euphoria faded. “It has to,” says Hunt. “It’s the old saw about campaigning in poetry and governing in prose. I don’t have to tell the Irish that prose is never as lyrical as poetry.” In Obama’s victory speech in Chicago, the elation of the moment mingled with a premonition of the trials to come. “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer,” Obama said.

But the new president-elect went on to outline “the enormity of the task that lies ahead . . . two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century”. These problems – Afghanistan, Iraq, climate change and the recession – have marked the first year of Obama’s presidency. October saw the highest number of US casualties in eight years of war in Afghanistan, and a resurgence of violence in Baghdad. The commerce department released encouraging growth figures on Thursday, but unemployment, which is expected to peak at 10.3 per cent in early 2010, is still a drag on the economy.

Obama’s dream of winning bi-partisan support floundered when not one Republican in the House voted for his $787 billion stimulus package. With rare exceptions, the pattern has continued. In town hall meetings last summer, in committee rooms on Capitol Hill, the “party of No” poisoned negotiations on healthcare reform. Deadlines set by Obama keep slipping by, but the president nonetheless hopes to sign a bill by the end of the year. He’s famous for compromising, and critics fear he’ll jettison the goal of a government-provided insurance option, though polls show a majority of Americans now want it. After healthcare, another Congressional battle is looming, on climate change.

As the first anniversary of his election approaches, the US is in wait-and-see mode, suspending judgment on Obama until it’s clear whether the economic recovery will take hold, whether he can see reforms through, and extract the US from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Pulitzer prize-winning biographer of presidents Lincoln, Roosevelt, Johnson and Kennedy, says Obama confronts greater challenges than any recent president: “FDR faced a deeper economic depression, but he didn’t have the same global worries for his first term and a half. LBJ’s brilliant period, of civil rights legislation, medicare and education, was before Vietnam occupied his attention. Kennedy faced difficult foreign policy crises, especially Cuba, but the domestic crises weren’t the same. Obama lives in one of those times that create the potential for greatness.”

Kearns Goodwin knows Obama well. In 2007, when he was still trailing Hillary Clinton in opinion polls, he called the historian to say he had read her book Team of Rivals, about how Abraham Lincoln made his political rival, the New York senator William Seward, his secretary of state. When Obama chose Joe Biden as vice president, Clinton as secretary of state and the Republican Robert Gates as secretary of defence, “Team of Rivals” became a sort of brand name for the Obama method. Today, analysts are unanimous in praising the harmony within his cabinet.

KEARNS GOODWIN and her husband Richard, who worked for presidents Johnson and Kennedy, discussed past presidents with Obama the candidate. This autumn, she was invited to Obama’s private White House dinner with a handful of presidential historians. “He has an extraordinary temperament,” says Kearns Goodwin. “He’s got the confidence to surround himself with people who can question his assumptions, just as FDR and Abraham Lincoln did. He has that kind of equanimity that doesn’t get rattled. He’s willing to take his time to make decisions, not be rushed into them.”

Others interpret Obama’s even temperament as coldness or detachment. The former vice president Dick Cheney has accused Obama of “dithering” over whether to send 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. Some of the president’s admirers show impatience over other issues. “Obama has let himself be boxed in by bureaucracy, by the political culture,” complains Prof Lucas. “Look how many prisoners are still in Guantánamo. [Obama promised to close down the prison; 221 men are still held there.] He hasn’t rolled back Bush administration measures such as the Patriot Act, surveillance and eavesdropping. And there are still 130,000 US troops in Iraq.”

Thomas Frank, an author of political books and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, says he’s “a big fan” of Obama who has been sorely disappointed. “He is extremely talented, super-smart, probably the best orator my generation has produced. He came to office with a significant mandate and during a national crisis. But they’re only just now getting around to consider regulating the financial sector. He is just now starting to bring the healthcare debate to a close. He should have done this stuff right away.”

It was obvious that Obama is more popular outside the US than at home when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Price on October 9th. David Abshire, who was Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Nato and now heads the Centre for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, says Obama’s global popularity, due in part to the speech in Cairo in which he reached out to the Muslim world, is “not insignificant” but does not “translate into leverage”.

Abshire may be right: Obama’s efforts to broker peace between Israelis and Palestinians have reached a stalemate. Iran appears to be exploiting Obama’s goodwill to buy time for its nuclear programme. Nuclear disarmament is one area where Obama has made progress; in July, he and the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, agreed to reduce their nuclear stockpiles by one third.

Abshire believes Obama “wanted to govern from the centre” but has allowed Congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to “pull him to the left”. He praises Obama for making Gen Jim Jones “a 6 foot 4½ inch tall decorated marine” his National Security advisor, and for bringing Clinton, Gates and Leon Panetta into his cabinet. They comprise “a tough, centrist National Security Council” that make breakdowns in judgment on the scale of the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam or the Iran Contra scandal extremely unlikely, Abshire says.

OBAMA IS FAULTED for not imposing his will on Democratic Congressmen, including reluctant “blue dog” or conservative Democrats. Lyndon Baines Johnson never hesitated to ring a senator at 2am; in fact, “he relished it,” Kearns Goodwin recalls. With far less Congressional experience, Obama doesn’t have that close relationship with lawmakers, and he risks losing ground in next year’s mid-term elections.

In his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King talked about “the fierce urgency of Now,” a phrase used by Obama. It is a paradox of his young presidency that he is criticised for attempting to do too much, too fast, and for achieving few concrete results.

Despite the setbacks, Kearns Goodwin insists Obama hasn’t lost that sense of urgency: “He’s read a lot of history, so he knows you have to make the most of it, that days can slip by for presidents. They get caught up in the daily schedule, forget they have a chance to change things. That’s what he ran on. That’s what he won on. It’s important to keep that sense alive, even if you get bogged down by the slowness of things in Washington. History helps you to do that.”