Obama: Good Ideas, Bad Politics

“I am a very intellectual person,” said Adrian Mole, a fictitious character invented by an English comic, “but, unfortunately, I’m not very clever.” We all know people of this type, those who think a lot but whose way of reasoning makes no sense. These are individuals who have been given great cerebral gifts, but who lack common sense: deep thinkers who can unravel the secrets of the universe, but who are incapable of applying logic to the simple problems of daily life.

I do not dare suppose that Barack Obama, as an intellectual, is on a par with Sir Isaac Newton, who discovered how to describe the universe, though unable to find his way from his office at the University of Cambridge to the university cafeteria. Nor is Obama up to the level of Adam Smith, who planted the seed for the great scientific principles of capitalist economies, while not knowing how to prepare a cup of tea. Nor can Obama compare to the great Spanish astronomer Arturo Duperier, who found solutions to the immense problems of the trajectory of cosmic rays, but could neither sew a button nor balance his checkbook.

On the other hand, it is clear now that Obama has something in common with those great and wise men: he knows how to think, but he does not know what to do.

His predicament is even more serious. It is not just that he thinks a lot, but that he expects a lot and trusts in that which he called, in the first volume of his autobiography, the audacity of hope. Hope leads to deception, and optimism is a sure path to disappointment. I am a pessimist, and, therefore, I am happy. I expect the worst, and this scares away deception. Sometimes — rarely — things end up a little less poorly than I had predicted, and life, in those moments, seems beautiful to me.

In the case of Mr. Obama, I think that his presidency will end badly because it began on such a note of inverted emotion. All is well that ends well? It will not be true in this case. The voters who voted in this “change we can believe in” are now resigned to prolonged wars, a never-ending financial crisis, a growing budget deficit, a stagnant economy, the promised social welfare delayed and premiums paid by banks that grow faster than ever. The only “change we can believe in,” it seems, is the change that will never come.

The failure of the Obama presidency seems to be certain. He has just lost his absolute majority in the Senate. In this year’s coming elections, it is likely that he will also lose the House. In any case, whatever possibility he had to carry out his legislative program is now dead. He has no way to change the makeup of the Supreme Court, another obstacle to his hoped-for reforms, since those appointed cannot, according to the Constitution, be removed except through their own resignation or death.

So, the projects he announced in the electoral campaign of 2007 are in ruins: the war in Iraq will continue and universal health care will continue to be a chimera. It is not through lack of will or what the first President Bush called “that visionary thing.” Obama is energetic and aggressive. His ideals are abundant, and his ambitions are noble. He dreams of a welfare system in the United States on par with that of the European Union. He is working for world peace—although his methods are not very intuitive—and he is searching for ways to calm the preoccupations of Israel toward the Palestinians.

He also wants to put an end to the abuses of human rights that his countrymen perpetrated under the Bush administration. He wants to see environmental conditions improve, and he would like world commerce to be more free and flexible. He is trying to open respectful and fertile relations with other countries. He sincerely desires a better life for the most disadvantaged of his country—the poor immigrants. But, while his intentions are good, what are lacking are practical and tangible strategies to achieve his proposed goals.

The project he has pursued most persistently has been the creation of free health care for the whole country. It seems like a lie that the richest nation in the world—one that has enough resources to start wars in far-away places and send astronauts to other worlds—denies its citizens such a basic right. For Barack Obama, the excitement inherent in the idea of solving a problem that defeated the Clintons is commendable. However, it must be stated plainly: there is no chance of putting in place a true public health system in the United States without radically reforming the entire political system.

Based on polls, Obama thought that the great majority of voters supported his policies, but he did not take into account the fact that public health care reform is something that people support on a rhetorical level, but very few Americans are willing to vote for such a thing. The middle class—who make up the majority of the voting public—is very satisfied with the present system. The poor, those who cannot pay the enormous cost of insurance, have now become part of that almost 50 percent of the population that does not vote.

On the other hand, insurance companies and private health service providers have tied the hands—very tightly, too—of judges and politicians through means which are legal in the United States, but which are considered corrupt in Europe. With their economic clout, they represent an implacable lobby capable of setting up electoral campaigns in favor of or against any given political leader, according to the degree to which such leader is in complicity with that sector.

Something similar is occurring with the other frustrations facing the president. Peace in the Middle East is unreachable because the groups that bring pressure to bear in favor of Israel while uniting Jews and Evangelical Christians—those who consider Israel a divine creation prophesied since Biblical times—control more or less, several important electoral districts.

Wars are unending, in part, due to the weight of political pressure exerted by those sectors with great investments in theaters of war, the oil industry, and the weapons industry. Efforts to diminish atmospheric pollution have to run up against the pressure of several industries which produce pollution, who also have sufficient wealth to buy many votes in the legislature. Interests with ties to the previous regime, with their money and influence in and among the political class, are opposed to freedom for the victims of Guantanamo and to the bringing to justice of those who are guilty of human rights violations.

Unions spend their enormous funds in buying votes and paying for campaigns against free enterprise. What is more, if there is anything the unions and big industry have in common, it is that both want to deny rights to the majority of immigrants: unions want to kick them out of the country while the corporations want to include them in order to exploit them.

Actually, the rules for politics in the United States are pretty simple. To use a popular English saying, he who pays the piper chooses the song. Money talks, and the law allows those with money to finance the electoral campaigns of whomever they wish. In other countries, such contributions are considered bribery, which is what they are. On the other hand, pressure groups can threaten the legislators who offend them while dedicating funds to their opposition or launching defamation campaigns in their electoral districts. Of course, the political system is sick, suffering from blocked and hardened arteries due to the accumulation of bribes and blackmail.

In a given moment, as he was winning the presidential election, Obama thought that he had found the way to bring the system down. His campaign was financed, in part, by following the same old methods: greased by the contributions of rich donors. However, he avoided becoming anyone’s client, attracting his financial support from a large number of people of modest means from the middle and working classes whose donations added up, in total, to more than that of the rich and more than all the money raised by the other candidates. Legislative elections, however, are still a lake in which the fat fish eat the rest. There are so many electoral districts, and the elections are so frequent—every two years in the case of the House of Representatives—that it is unthinkable that the lower classes could possibly challenge the wealthy interests.

So, in order to realize his goals and aspirations, the president would have to begin as Christ did, by expelling the merchants from the temple. It is possible that such an experiment may have ended with martyrdom, but without even trying, any other effort is in vain. There was an unrealized opportunity in the person of the vanquished candidate for president, Senator John McCain, whose great crusade has always been the reformation of the system for financing elections and the elimination of electoral corruption. To become the candidate for his party, McCain had to abandon these policies. Still, in the core of his being he was consistently faithful to these reformations and, to judge by his recent observations and commentary, he still is. Obama could have offered him a post in his cabinet, with the special responsibility of carrying out such reforms, and McCain would have accepted. He had, in fact, no other way left in which to play a decisive role in the history of his country.

McCain’s party, as was seen in the electoral campaign, had abandoned the moderate tradition that McCain represented in order to swing more to the right. For Obama, such an alliance would have been an admirable coup, bringing in his greatest rival to work alongside Mrs. Clinton. Thus, he would have shown himself to be above partisan politics, demonstrating, by deed as well as by word, that dreamed-of “change we can believe in.” If he had failed in such an attempt, the martyred one would have been Senator McCain. Of course, Obama would have had to sacrifice some of his beloved projects: the same ones that have now drowned in the sea of the corrupt U.S. political system.