Obama’s New “New Deal”

Disappointed with the U.S. President, who recently celebrated his first year in office, some critics claim he is “not really black, but is deceiving and posing as black.”

This accusation demonstrates a double lack of understanding, because ethnic membership does not determine ideological ascription, nor should it have been assumed to play such an excessive role in Obama’s electoral message. The marines did not return from Iraq immediately, there was no understanding with Hamas, nor negotiations with the Taliban. No president of a great superpower is going to dismantle his economic, ideological and military hegemony.

The economic measures proposed to Congress (Feb. 25, 2009) specified the intended goals of the head of state. His aim: to make “the United States the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history,” not through a savage capitalist lack of restraint, but rather through state-operated Keynesian interventionism. His criticism of the system: “we have lived through an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election. A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market.” His recovery plan: “a new lending fund that represents the largest effort ever to help provide auto loans, college loans, and small business loans to the consumers and entrepreneurs who keep this economy running… a housing plan that will help responsible families facing the threat of foreclosure lower their monthly payments and re-finance their mortgages.”

And another vital strategy: “investment in education…We have dramatically expanded early childhood education and will continue to improve its quality, because we know that the most formative learning comes in those first years of life. We have made college affordable for nearly seven million more students. And we have provided the resources necessary to prevent painful cuts and teacher layoffs that would set back our children’s progress… And we will expand our commitment to charter schools.”

At the University of Cairo (April 6, 2009), with verses from the Koran, Obama proclaimed his admiration for Islam and offered fraternal coexistence with the Arab world, stated that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories was “intolerable” and urged the recognition of a Palestinian state. Upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, he reaffirmed “the right of people everywhere to determine their own destiny,” with explicit censure of the invasion of Iraq.

Radical voices, like that of Noam Chomsky, see all this as only a rhetorical shift and even prefer Bush’s attitudes regarding Israel. Nevertheless, such critics do not recognize that the ascension of Obama demonstrates that in a democracy the political pendulum operates as a source of clarity for the nation to correct the transgressions of insolent governments, drunk from power. And this new New Deal has hardly begun.