A Victory that Changes Everything

The adoption of health care reform by Congress gives the American president back his wings.

It’s a bit as though President Obama bounded out of his hospital bed, ripped out his IV and did a few dance steps around the Oval Office. The vote by Congress on health care reform has reinvigorated his presidency and will have consequences for the entire world. By succeeding where his predecessors, from Theodore Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, failed, Barack Obama can boast of a historic success. And for the same reason, he gets rid of the image that had begun to stick to him: that of a weak president who can never manage to successfully complete his projects.

The wind of optimism, which in January 2009 had accompanied his swearing-in, dwindled a lot during the months that followed, to the point where many began to see in him a man who talks a lot but does little. A naïf who allows himself to be bullied by tough guys all over the world. Despised by the conservative right, he had, during an off-year election, succeeded in the feat of helping his party lose the seat of the Massachusetts senator, one of the longest held by the Democrats.

His apparent inability to get his reform bill passed harmed his credibility significantly in the United States and the rest of the world. Foreigners certainly do not have a passionate interest in the nuances of the passage of legislation by the Senate. They were content to observe this fact: In spite of his popularity and the large majority he holds in Congress, Obama encountered the greatest challenges to realize his principal reform.

Gradually, these internal difficulties ended up influencing judgments about him in foreign policy matters. He was more and more openly suspected of announcing very ambitious goals and never achieving them. Did he not proclaim that he would relaunch the Middle East peace process while to date no talks have started? From the evening of his election, did he not make protecting the planet one of his priorities, without managing to prevent the fiasco of the Copenhagen conference? Did he not for some time deliberate over what strategy to implement in Afghanistan, before announcing the dispatch of reinforcements, without giving the impression that he was convinced of the operation’s legitimacy?

The foreign media thus began to paint a portrait of Barack Obama as a weak, indecisive, ineffectual man. After his success with health care reform, all those assumptions will change — at least for the moment. A priori, no direct link exists between Obama’s renewed strength on the national scene and his chances of success in foreign policy. But there is, however, an indirect link: In the future, the heads of foreign countries must undoubtedly show less skepticism regarding his chances of making progress in international affairs. Those who might have been tempted to make light of him will from now on have to look at him twice. If Obama had failed to pass his bill, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in Washington in order to speak at the conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful of the pro-Israeli lobbies, would have perhaps tried to rally opponents of the new American policy in the Middle East. For now, it seems more complicated.

As a result, observers are now looking with a more favorable eye on the first year of the Obama administration. They seem to have discovered that it even succeeded in avoiding a total collapse of the banking sector, while also discovering that the growth of the American economy, which at about 6 percent is stronger than that of other western countries . . .

American conservatives are not wrong to declare that the reform of the health care system moves the United States closer to European countries and distances it from its tradition of pure individualism. One can debate the advantages and disadvantages of such a change. But the United States should draw an indirect benefit from it in foreign policy. By promising social protection to almost all its citizens, Obama will restore the image of the United States from the one Michael Moore, for example, managed to export: that of a country that only functions because the poor are crushed by big companies.