The Sacrifice

America, as reflected by the election results, is a confused, short-tempered nation, of a kind that cannot on her own work out a way to save herself. Obama was the one to pay the price.

The Democratic defeat will echo in the coming weeks in American and world politics, and there will be much talk about Obama’s status. Fair enough. Not since John Kennedy, has America had a president with such an all-embracing personal story; therefore, it is only natural to focus on the individual — on him, and not on the American economy or on the Democratic Party’s state. What happened on Tuesday is Obama’s political tragedy. Not only had he formulated the vision, but in his personality, he had been the vision. And when the Americans decided to reject Obama’s political idea, they rejected him as well. It became personal.

But in spite of it, we must not let this element cloud our big picture of America as reflected in these elections – and it’s the picture of a nation in distress. Only two years ago the Americans elected Obama so that he would bring change. He had promised to rescue the United States from the recession. He had promised health insurance for tens of millions of Americans. He had pledged to change the standing of the United States in the world, to pull the American Army out of Iraq and to focus on the real terror nests — in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He did all these things. The United States is suffering from malignant unemployment and the slow creation of new jobs, but America is not in the deep recession where George Bush had been leading. The health insurance reform promises a real change for millions, and its significance is historical. The large automotive companies that risked bankruptcy — GM, Chrysler, Ford — have survived. The American soldiers have left Iraq; and in Afghanistan, Obama has ordered a mighty reinforcement. The international condition of the United States is infinitely better from what it had been two and a half years ago.

But America is bubbling with frustration and anger. Of course, she’s got good reasons. The feeling is that the administration is suffering from the dearth of unity of action. The lack of economic confidence overshadows any statistical achievement; the Americans simply hate the feeling that any day they might lose their jobs. The prices of the houses they dwell in — their main assets — continue to lose value. The president looks emotionally disconnected from the public — perhaps, a president-philosopher, but not an inspiring leader that transmits empathy.

In the face of all these things, the consequences appear. And maybe this, as a matter of fact, is the problem. The Americans grew accustomed to the eight years of George Bush. Except for the war on terror and tax benefits (opium for the masses, a Marxist would have said), Bush was a president who acted with low intensity — modestly speaking, of course. Bush was a president who went to bed around 8:00 p.m. The cheap money the Fed had printed streamed freely, along with the tax benefits; the real estate market grew into a bubble; war expenses expanded; the deficit reached terrifying dimensions; and Bush encouraged his aides to take vacations.

Obama has done an extraordinary thing — a thing that raised the fury of his opponents and stunned even his steady supporters: He got elected and began implementing the policy he declared. As a presidential candidate, he introduced himself as an “above-partisan” figure. This way, he swept the independent voters and women — those who gave him the stirring victory. But for him, the “above-partisanship” was expressed in that he agreed to negotiate with the Republicans about an outline of the health reform (and to abandon the “public option,” the establishment of the American Health Maintenance Organization) or about the stimulus plan. The meaning of “above-partisanship,” Obama actually said, is not to give up on the principles for which he got the Americans’ support.

This sounds logical, but for a nation that enjoyed the fools’ paradise in President Bush’s era, it has been a very extreme thing. “The tea party,” the populist-Republican protest movement, already started to gain multitudes at its rallies with the passage of the stimulus plan — an essential issue in the Democrats’ political ideology. The health insurance plan was explicitly promised by Obama. The increased government spending due to the economic situation is a matter located at the heart of the Democratic concept since the 1930s.

The bottom line is that there are no surprises here. Obama has done what was expected of him, and at the present time, he’s facing anger. This anger originates, among other things, in that less than 10 percent of Americans know that the Obama administration has, in fact, offered tax benefits to the middle class. In other words: There is a lot of ignorance here, too.

The worrisome thing is that the Americans are angry with Obama, not only owing to the failures of the administration, but also for the reason that all in all, he puts in action the policy that they had elected him to do in the first place. Only two years ago, the Americans wanted a Democaratic president who would protect them socially, who would create health insurance and so on, and now they want something else. The picture emerging here is that of a confused, short-tempered nation, of a kind that cannot on her own work out the way to save herself.

The Republicans, under the strategic guidance of Karl Rove — the man who succeeded to turn even George Bush into a president — have registered for themselves a brilliant success. Eventually, they functioned as an accomplished and biting opposition and carried out a policy that is always the most successful as an alternative to the government: to attack and not to promise any specific plan. The “Commitment to America,” presented by the Republicans as a political concept opposed to President Obama’s vision, is a collection of general and vague ideas that are a refined extract of Bush policy.

Now the real troubles begin.

John Boehner, the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, will need to cope not only with the Democrats, but also with the two factions inside of the Republican Party. The chasm is gaping between the veteran Republican establishment — relatively, the moderate one — and the more extremist tea party. Contrary to the classic American conservatism — the one supporting economic neo-liberalism, siding with small government and minimal interference in the citizens’ lives — the tea party represents a new [version of the] old species of the American body politic — the populist right.

The veteran — the old — Republican would say that the administration has neither the permission nor the authority to intervene in the building of the mosque next to ground zero. The tea party man would say: The government should ban it. The veteran Republican would say that as many as possible trade restrictions should be removed, because free trade serves America, and the markets are going to regulate themselves anyway. In opposition, a congressman on behalf of the tea party would demand imposition of import taxes on Chinese products in order to safeguard American workplaces and practically, would take positions that characterized the more radical sides of the Democratic Party. Needless to say, the Republican establishment despises a part of the tea party and mainly the one representing them, Sarah Palin (the verdict of the professional politicians: “too stupid to be a president”).

At the moment, the Republicans will need to prove their ability to cooperate and to unite around one message; their huge victory could tempt them to share the skin of the bear before it’s hunted. The bear is certainly the presidency, and in 1994, at their previous great victory, the Republicans managed to destroy themselves in incessant inner arguments. On the other hand, then there was Bill “The Magician” Clinton sitting in the White House, who knew how to navigate his presidency to economic and national success. At one time, they would say about Barack Obama that he is not Roosevelt; now they say that he is not John Kennedy. The question is whether in a year they are going to say about Obama that he is not Bill Clinton, as well.