Obama, Year One

Reality imposes its limitations on the president of the United States and freezes his idyll with his fellow citizens.

A year has passed since almost two million people were spellbound at his inauguration, and Barack Obama has rapidly dropped them back into reality. For the political agenda of the U.S. president, yesterday’s loss in Massachusetts of the Senate seat that the iconic liberal Edward Kennedy held for 46 years is a warning sign. It’s not only because Republican Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts overturns the Democrats’ super-majority that guaranteed the health reform bill, the apple of the president’s eye, an easy passage through the Senate. The electoral reverse also demonstrates what opinion polls have been anticipating with a fall in his approval rating from 70 percent to 50 percent: Obama is less in tune with the citizens. The midterm elections in November will be complicated for the Democrats.

Massachusetts provides a good summary of the president’s difficulties, but his first year in the White House proved to be more stimulating than suggested by the failure in the Democrats’ deepest stronghold. Obama is stabilizing a bad economy and on the way to instituting, for the first time in the history of the United States, something similar to a modern healthcare system. And his pledge to restore American values, which seems to have eliminated the torture practices permitted by the previous administration, has managed to dissipate the attitude of fear and resentment toward the U.S. that Bush had achieved on the international stage.

Certainly, Obama, the premature Nobel Peace Prize winner, carries on the war in Afghanistan under basically the same parameters designed by his predecessor. And he has engaged with China, Russia and Iran to little or no effect. Neither has he put forth sufficient effort to modify the Israeli intransigence in the Near East. These scenarios and others crudely reveal the limitations of a policy that, like Obama’s, carries signs of goodwill.

At the same time, this all shows — to the surprise of those who saw his arrival at the White House as messianic — the difficulties the president faces in his efforts to alter the direction of the superpower. This direction is determined in great measure by consolidated strategies and interests, and guaranteed by formidable military systems and foreign policy. Obama’s greatest difficulties have hardly begun.