Barack Obama, a “Victim” of the Crisis

Two years after his triumphant election and the hopes it nourished, even though his record is far from negligible, Barack Obama has just suffered a defeat for which he is partly—and only partly—responsible: despite his oratory and “communication” skills, he who promised change has failed to convince Americans that change takes time. Several times, he has lacked the audacity that, in the days after his election, seemed to characterize him. Today, his words no longer carry the day, no doubt because they are too “intellectual” for a public opinion that, still traumatized by the crisis, has become very down-to-earth. The Americans are newly sympathetic to conservative arguments; suspicious of elites, they prefer action over analysis, and they expected concrete results in their personal lives that aren’t coming—or, more precisely, that have been deferred because of the crisis.

That Barack Obama wanted to reform health insurance, that he has imposed, against almost everyone, universal medical coverage for the disadvantaged (a group that does not run to the polls); that he has held institutions such as banks and insurance companies accountable; that he actually saved an American economy on the brink with a $787 million stimulus plan—none of that changed anything for the average American, meaning the class that went to vote, thinking that, really, with this “socialist” president—an insult here—unemployment, taxes, and fees had increased more than elsewhere, not counting all of the regulations that hinder the sacrosanct “liberty,” a term that is willingly slapped on everything.

It must be said that Obama, with both hands stuck in the crisis, was too late in measuring the extent of the attacks launched by a Right whose arguments have the most populist sway.

But he has lost on a “fit of rage” from part of his electorate who, without being openly hostile to him (a majority of Americans want him to be re-elected in 2012), has made the “establishment” pay for the consequences of the crisis.

This reflex is not peculiar to the United States, which always favors the opposition regardless of whether it is the right or the left: we saw this recently in Great Britain with the conservative victory, and we can already see it in countries like Spain, Italy and France where officials in power are at their worst. Crisis hits people. It can also, in the most democratic of worlds, hit their leaders.