AMERICA:High moments of the early presidency dissipate over a stalled healthcare Bill and mounting casualties in Afghanistan, writes LARA MARLOWEWashington Correspondent
THIS was the year of Barack Obama, and by extension, of America. But if we thought we knew who he was last January, by year’s end we weren’t so certain.
We expected him to wrestle the helm of the great ship of state, inflect its course, end the wars, rebuild the economy and confound the lobbies and special interest groups who determine how business is done in Washington. With a strong Democratic majority in Congress, we expected him to see through groundbreaking legislation on healthcare and climate change.
An Irish diplomat recalls the tribute to Senator Ted Kennedy at the Kennedy Centre in March with nostalgia – the frisson when Barack and Michelle Obama came on to the stage, the impression of Camelot revisited. Obama’s election was the embodiment of all that Kennedy worked for – the human rights movement, universal healthcare. When Obama spoke at Kennedy’s funeral in Boston in August, there was a sense of the torch being passed to a new generation.
High moments shone through the pall of the economy and the wars. Liberals rejoiced when Obama began by banning torture and ordering the closure of Guantánamo prison (though the January deadline will not be met). In Prague in April, the president promised to seek “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons”.
Three months later the US and Russia agreed to reduce their nuclear stockpiles. In September Obama cancelled George Bush’s plans for a missile defence shield in Europe.
For Muslims it was stunning to hear Obama speak in Cairo of “the daily humiliations” and “intolerable situation” endured by Palestinians; undreamt of for a US president to call the Israeli hold on Arab lands by its true name: occupation. At the UN in September, Obama called for “a new era of engagement” between the US and the rest of the world.
But by late summer, the atmosphere in the US had changed. A subtext of racist rejection of America’s first black president ran through town hall meetings and “tea parties”. Hope began to fray. Casualties were mounting in Afghanistan, and healthcare legislation was stalled. From the beginning Obama’s belief that he could persuade the Republicans to work for the greater good proved naive. Not a single Republican voted for his $787 billion stimulus package. Only one voted for the healthcare Bill that passed in November.
Americans are an impatient people, seeking simple solutions to complicated problems. Obama’s careful approach frustrated even his own admirers. “We didn’t elect Obama to be an expedient president. We elected him to be a great one,” columnist Eugene Robinson wrote in August. Through the autumn, less kind commentators urged the president to prove his male attributes, regain his “fighting spirit”.
As the end of the year approaches, the Senate has agreed a healthcare Bill.
The House and Senate might now reconcile their respective drafts before Obama’s state of the union address next month.
The loss in November of the governors’ offices in New Jersey and Virginia to Republicans was a wake-up call. With mid-term elections in November 2010 Democrats in precarious seats are behaving like frightened animals caught in the headlights.
Obama’s image was hurt by the perception that he cosseted Wall Street but allowed the banks to foreclose on Joe Average’s mortgage. A cartoon showed the White House with a sign saying “subsidiary of Goldman Sachs” on the lawn. Even those who accepted the government bailout was essential to avoid a financial meltdown gagged on reports that top Wall Street Banks would pay $30 billion in bonuses, at a time when 17 million Americans were unemployed.
Obama seemed a little cut off. “Sometimes it’s hard to break out of the bubble here in Washington and remind ourselves that behind these statistics are people’s lives,” he admitted this month. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama compared himself to “a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views”. His ability to represent so many things to such diverse populations ensured that many would feel let down. He recognised the danger: “I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them,” he wrote.
To the chagrin of many Democrats, Obama the idealistic progressive seemed to morph into something like a Republican. After a three-month review of Afghan strategy, he announced on December 1st he was deploying 30,000 more troops.
House speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke of “serious unrest” among Democrats over the Afghan escalation. Obama’s only sop to them – the promise that he’d begin to withdraw forces in July 2011 – was gutted of all substance by defence secretary Robert Gates, secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Gen Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan. The “military-industrial complex” that President Dwight D Eisenhower warned of had prevailed.
A defining moment came nine days later, when Obama became an apologist for war in his acceptance speech for the Nobel peace prize. He could not follow the non-violent examples of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, because “I face the world as it is”, Obama said, as if the British Raj and the murderous racism of the American deep south were not “the world as it is”.
Human rights campaigners had faulted Obama for refusing to meet the Dalai Lama (to avoid offending China) and for meek performances on Sudan, Burma and Iran. Alluding to these critics in Oslo, the realpolitik Obama derided the “satisfying purity of indignation”.
By catering to Americans’ sense of pride and self-justification, Obama’s Nobel lecture won praise across the US political spectrum. The right-wing Wall Street Journal hailed his “move toward the centre” as “welcome news”.
The British TV revue Beyond the Fringe, decades before the advent of Barack Obama, might provide an explanation for his apparent transformation. The Americans inherited the British two-party system, Jonathan Miller told Dudley Moore. “They have the Republican party, which is the equivalent of our Conservative party, and they have the Democratic party, which is the equivalent of our Conservative party.”