The Prohibited Failure

Two wars and the most severe recession since the 1930s: The challenges with which Obama finds himself confronted are spectacular. No one measures the scale of them better than he; he so much prepared himself for this burden that he has already virtually been in practice since his triumphant election last Nov. 4 and the eclipse of George W. Bush. But as he recalls it himself some days ago during a long televised interview, he would only know to have one president at a time. It is necessary to be inaugurated in Abraham Lincoln’s office to plainly take conscience of the crushing reality of the function of the president of the United States of America.

The anticipation that gives rise to the 44th American president is exceptional, in the United States and beyond its borders. With Obama, the black messiah, America gets back in touch, in the eyes of many, with the best of its legend, those of the “city on the hill” prided by Constituents, of an evangelical America, beacon of hope and liberty for the desperate of the Old World. It is from where this touching and sincere fever, this “obamania” that seizes itself from public opinion at the time alarmed by the profoundness of the crisis and perceiving the new president as a resort against the wrongs of the time.

From now on, all of this does a lot for the man “in charge” in Washington. Admittedly, but not displeasing to those who justly succumb a little too quickly to “obamania.” The new American president has overall been elected by his fellow-citizens in order to reconstruct the American economy. His first responsibility, or “my job,” is to create or save millions of jobs while the country has been losing them at a rate of a half-million per month since autumn.

It is the object of the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan” of 825 million dollars that he elaborated some weeks ago with Congress. Before he harnesses himself to his task of Sisyphus, Obama anticipated: It will take years before we recover prosperity. The savings rate of Americans has fallen to zero, the indebtedness will soar and the fallout of the value of homes has broken a major foundation in the trust of citizens.

Taking the head of the country in plain economic derailing in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt one day had a formula for apocalypse: “If I fail, I will have been the last…” The same sense of urgency, the same prohibition of failure lives in Barack Obama. He must succeed at his New Deal, of course for the United States, but also for the rest of the world.