Four Against Obama

The Obama fad of 2008 is over, not only in the United States but everywhere. The Nobel Prize laureate didn’t accomplish enough. But despite scattered anti-Obama sentiment, chances for the incumbent president can’t be considered nonexistent. What he’s unable to do is being done by the Republicans themselves, and with considerable success. Just before the Florida primary, there are four people who spend more time fighting among themselves than they do fighting Obama, who is again casting himself as a Prince of Peace and Society. But that’s a nonexistent movement.

Vibrant verve, however, has also disappeared among the Republicans. Virtually nothing remains of the tea party movement’s rage. None of the four remaining Republican candidates associate themselves with the tea partyers. Michele Bachmann was briefly their one great hope, but she recently threw in the towel because she stood little chance of winning. No one even mentions Sarah Palin anymore. The four remaining candidates — Gingrich, Paul (virtually no chance), Santorum and Romney — are all engaged in trying to look moderate while trying to paint the other three as anything but. The result: The Republican candidates appear less interested in addressing America’s actual problems than in squabbling among themselves on scurrilous personality and credibility issues.

The most defined political profile belongs by far to veteran Ron Paul, who — despite his vehement rejection of the “isolationist” label — advocates a non-interventionist foreign policy, rejects the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and warns against military action against Iran. Paul has branded America’s “reactionary foreign policy” as wrong since 2001 — thus mainly criticizing the policies of his party colleague George W. Bush. Notably, Paul goes so far as to advocate a United States withdrawal from such organizations as NATO, the U.N. and the IMF. While completely desirable, even considering the impact on Europe and despite broad-based support among Americans, it is totally unrealistic.

By far the oldest of the candidates, Paul is the prototypical American who favors a “lean state” limited to providing only the basics as far as necessary. And the other candidates — Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and the “favorite” Mitt Romney — all see Satan’s handiwork in higher taxes and social spending. In contrast to the old conservative Ron Paul, they represent the official Republican mainstream philosophy, have even come to terms with issues like same-sex marriage, more or less, and are becoming more flexible on immigration from the non-white world. Whether that reflects their actual thinking or they see it as the unavoidable change overtaking American society, in view of [what has] largely been a show or theatrical spectacle, remains to be seen. First and foremost, it may be an attempt to control conservatives (represented by the tea party movement), integrating them into the mainstream Republican Party while exploiting popular disappointment with the incumbent president for the party’s own hegemonic purposes. But since the current problems are already partially existential in nature, Republicans don’t avoid mentioning them, as if by silent consensus.

Problems abound. Above all, the U.S. economy is bogged down in a hopeless condition. The debt level is such that barring an external influence such as war and/or inflation, not much can be undertaken. What the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve have done amounts to buying time with a zero interest rate policy, in the hope of keeping the snowball rolling. But without Europe — and the Germans are as yet unconvinced of this — the situation will rapidly deteriorate. The People’s Republic of China doesn’t want to be savior of the U.S. economy. The United States itself is divided on many fronts: There is a razor-thin layer of the super-rich (from which there comes occasional self-criticism) and an ever-growing group of the poor, who were formerly members of the middle class. The world of soap operas in mass media is increasingly becoming apparent as hypocritical.

Overtly racist or xenophobic propaganda is on the decline. That approach may work with certain radicalized and voluble elements of the political base, but there are now so many African-American and Hispanic citizens that they can no longer be organized as a monolithic block. Although the subject, as is usual in American politics, plays no major role in the electoral campaign, there are serious foreign policy problems. After the United States’ attempt to establish permanent global hegemony to exploit conditions after 1990, something both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush attempted and that ended eventually in spectacular failure, all that remains is the dubious (and desperate) attempt to radicalize that same goal, thereby risking a major war, or the recognition of a multipolar world. The first eventuality carries with it incalculable risk and the second contradicts all the traditions of American elites since the Coolidge administration.

It’s possible Obama may succeed in being reelected under these conditions. He would then, however, be a crippled head of state, scarcely in a position to act — in a situation where inaction is out of the question. In any case, he will never again be the beacon of hope he was in 2008.