Disillusionment

I must be one of the last people to have lost faith in Barack Obama. I still have the campaign merchandise my friends brought back for me from that famous New Hampshire rally, when he was senator and pronounced the slogan “Yes, we can,” which freely translates into the heading I give to this section of the newspaper: Anything is possible. I’m not going to change it, though Obama may have failed to deliver on his own citizens’ expectations as well as ours. The final straw that destroyed all remaining hope occurred when the U.S. responded to UNESCO´s admission of Palestine as a member by retaliating and withdrawing its funding.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner’s decision means that the man supposed to be the world’s most powerful politician just isn’t so anymore, and he hasn’t been for a while. Maybe it’s because he lacks the strength of will to impose his own judgement, or maybe he’s just changed his mind, which would be far worse. They argue in his defense that the president is bound to comply with a law from the 1990s which forbids the U.S. from making financial contributions to any U.N. organization that admits the Palestinians.

It is increasingly self-evident that Ronald Reagan left things well and truly sewn up, in this as well as many other issues whose ill effects we are now suffering. It would be purely rhetorical to ask why Obama cannot assert his authority, if Reagan could. The thing I most object to is not the sanctions against UNESCO, but Obama’s participation in the G-20 summit this week, acting on behalf of Wall Street in order to prevent the Europeans from fulfilling their pledge to impose a financial transaction tax. What a fiasco.