Obama: From Disenchantment to Lack of Hope

The president of the United States, Barack Obama, arrived yesterday at the middle of his term with the announcement — formulated by his spokesman, Robert Gibbs — that he would run for a second term in office at the end of the coming year. It is significant that the first public admission of Obama’s intentions for re-election comes in the middle of an unfavorable scene of marked waste of the political momentum that he carried — it has been two years — in becoming the first non-Caucasian president of that country, representing the spirits of political and moral renewal for millions of U.S. citizens and a hope for change in what Washington projects toward the world.

The principal expression of that deterioration is the electoral defeat that his party, the Democrats, suffered in last November’s elections, in which Republican conservatism obtained control of the House of Representatives and various governorships. The episode has represented, for the liberal and progressive camps of U.S. society, the beginning of a period of disillusionment about the perspective that has put in place internal changes, which that country requires in all areas. Indeed, if the first African-American president was incapable of advancing the substantial part of his government agenda during the period in which he could count on legislative petitions controlled by his fellow Democrats, it doesn’t seem probable that he can do it now, with the House of Representatives dominated by his political rivals. Paradoxically, Obama’s own vacillations and failures to act according to his principles in order to fulfill his agenda of change in his term’s two first years contrast with the tenacity and determination shown by the new Republican majority of the House of Representatives, as it demonstrated the day before yesterday with the repeal of the health care reform, enacted last year by the White House. Even though that legislative determination has few possibilities of passing in the Senate — still under Democratic control — the measure’s political effect is unquestionable and reveals a decidedly restoring spirit and a desire to dismantle, as soon as possible, the little constructed by the current U.S. administration.

If the outlook for the second half of Obama’s government is bleak in the inner sphere, how much more is it in the outer. Certainly, in the two years since the beginning of the current administration, and overall in recent months, Washington has successfully improved and deepened its diplomatic relations with emerging powers, which had deteriorated during the disastrous Bush administration: An example is the advance in the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia and the recent visit to the United States by Chinese President Hu Jintao. In contrast, the initial gestures of detente toward Iran have turned, with the passing months, into an increase in hostility in the West’s treatment toward the Persian nation, and with regards to his desire of rapprochement with the Islamic world — manifested by Obama at the start of his administration — the current chief has been incapable of transferring it to the world of facts. In contrast, the present government has made decisions not very far from the colonialist and aggressive spirit that characterized its predecessor, such as maintaining the military occupation in Afghanistan.

In sum, if the first year of Obama’s administration planted a wide feeling of disenchantment among his people and in the world, in the beginning of the second half of his administration all possible margin for the hope of change seems gone, whether because of legislative control in the hands of the Republican Party, because of the markedly pre-election look that Washington political life will have in the next two years, or because of his own administration’s incapacity to shake off the ideological inertia of his position’s predecessors.