U.S. Presidential Reformers –Obama Next?

In the United States, as in many other places where politics are the art of contradicting one’s self without blushing and the promises of the candidates rarely become the decisions of the presidents, perhaps Barack Obama has not been warned that proposing structural changes is extremely dangerous. The novelty doesn’t lie in proclaiming the necessity of such mutations, rather in being consistent with them and surviving the attempt.

In all its history, four American presidents promoted substantive changes to the interior political system: two of them, Lincoln and Kennedy paid with their lives. What nerve! Woodrow Wilson was humiliated by Congress and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the most popular of the American presidents, was accused of appeasing Stalin and making a pact with him for the division of Europe into zones of influence, permitting the formation of the socialist camp and the laying of the “Iron Curtain”.

Lincoln, the first reformer, wasn’t an abolitionist nor a benefactor of the blacks, rather a representative of the interests of the American state and of the dominant class, that in a decisive historic juncture, went to the Civil War in order to avoid southern oligarchy from provoking the dissolution of the country. The war of secession was not a movement of liberation in favor of the blacks, rather a showing of determination to maintain a united empire. In those circumstances, one thing could not be done without realizing the other and in time the myth was validated.

Although it advanced itself sufficiently for the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution that outlawed slavery to be approved, Andrew Johnson the Lincoln’s Vice-President, who succeeded him in office when he was assassinated, reversed almost all the policies that extended rights to the blacks, permitting the survival of racial segregation for another 99 years until in 1964 it was abolished by Kennedy’s efforts.

Even though in the time of Lincoln the problem of slavery was a debate among the white elite of the states, associated with economic negotiations, and one in which the blacks did not take part, in the seventies an extremely explosive situation took shape in which the blacks, led by men of their race, in particular Martin Luther King, unfurled a struggle that threatened to destabilize the country. In another historical juncture, acting in a pragmatic mode, President John F. Kennedy more comprehensively tackled the point of racial discrimination.

That which led to the conspiracy that ended in the Dallas assassination of November 22, 1963 was not the President’s intervention into the racial question nor his attitude during the invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs that displeased the Cuban mafia and the CIA, rather it was the sum of his reformist actions which suspiciously sidestepped the President’s confrontation with the high finance magnates when he gave practical steps to dismantle the Federal Reserve, nationalize the money creation, and order the Department of Treasury to print “Kennedy notes” which was reportedly the first regulation abolished by his successor Lyndon Johnson.

Before, in 1917, Woodrow Wilson noticed that American economic and military power could be the basis of world hegemony and decided to put and end to the isolationism of American foreign policy. The American intervention in the First World War catapulted the United States to world supremacy, but meant the death of 126, 000 American soldiers, something that the Congress did not forgive and in revenge, rejected the entry of the United States into the League of Nations, making Wilson’s most relevant project fail.

The historical merits of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the most brilliant of the North American statesman, the only one elected four time as President, had the talent and the valor for confronting the monopolies during the crisis of the thirties and put an end to the liberal fundamentalism in the economy by introducing governmental control in economic management, further promoting important social policies and the strategy that integrated the Soviet Union into the coalition that defeated Hitler fascism, are hidden precisely for having gone too far in their reforms.

Perhaps Obama might not become President and his capacity for reform might not be put to test. However, signaling the necessity for change is an important step. Perhaps that might be his role for now. That is no small role.