Obama’s Loss of Popularity Isn’t All His Fault

The image of Barack Obama has started to blur. Only a few now believe that the Afghan war will end in success. Many fear that the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq will make the country even more unstable. And almost no one thinks that one year is enough to solve the Palestinian problem. Obama could reply, with reason, that almost all of the major international crises of recent months are a legacy of former President George W. Bush. But his critics accuse him of setting unrealistic deadlines and showing intellectual arrogance.

There is a part of the country, of course, that recognizes his merit of having beat the American conservative resistance and forced the Congress to pass a health reform that guarantees for 16 million Americans a protection they never had. And there are those who don’t forget how quickly — a few months after entering the White House — he managed to save the banks from collapse and put the automobile industry back on track with a strong injection of public funds. But then there are the liberals and “marketists,” who are prejudicially against any intervention by the public hand. To make life even more difficult for Obama, in recent months an ideological battle was born between those who accuse him of having increased the debt and those who urge him to encourage consumption without paying too much attention to financial balance. These are extreme positions — perhaps equally wrong — but both hit Obama and make him less credible.

The fact that in this battle against Obama there is a hostile prejudice and an instrumental use of events attributable to the White House is shown by the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico. The explosion of an oil platform should be blamed on Bush and his policy of easy drilling.

But Obama has seemed cold, unfeeling and more inclined to blame the oil companies than to show sensitivity and compassion for the fishermen and farmers in Louisiana. It looks like Obama has become the scapegoat for everything that goes wrong in the country, regardless of his actual responsibilities. I don’t think that the creators of these campaigns are always and only Republicans with an eye to the upcoming midterm elections. The real enemy of the president is the populist front that identifies itself only partially with the opposition. Obama isn’t liked because he’s a progressive intellectual, came to politics from the austere halls of the University of Chicago and, perhaps, because he doesn’t belong to the “mainstream,” bone-white, Protestant, evangelical middle class of the United States. His skin color, his education in a Muslim school, his composed religiosity and his tendencies toward state intervention make him an alien in the eyes of America.

The populist front doesn’t have a leader yet. Sarah Palin and Fox television anchor Shepard Smith are just tribunes of the people, able to inflame the minds of the masses but not lead a political movement. Still, they can attract people and know how to give voice to the discontent of those who think Obama’s victory is a mistake that needs to be corrected as quickly as possible. Obama is facing his first midterm and can still reverse the situation. But he needs successes in economic and international policies. Otherwise, the victory of a black president will only be a brief period in the history of U.S. politics.