Liability

Obama is disappointing. The election of a young, black Democratic president, after eight years of Republican obscurantism and chauvinism, had raised high hopes – in the United States and beyond. Fourteen months from the American presidential election, Obama’s rating, according to all the polls, is at half-mast. There is one simple reason: “It’s the economy, stupid,” as James Carville, one of Bill Clinton’s strategists in his 1992 victory, had explained. Unemployment remains exceptionally high in the U.S., with serious social consequences — the dispossession of homes, loss of health plans and drop in status of the middle class, who made Obama successful. All cannot be blamed on the liability of the president who found himself at the head of a country literally ruined by the policies of George W. Bush, who deepened the deficit and debt of the U.S. while pursuing costly and risky wars.

Obama nevertheless remains the commander in chief, whether on Air Force One or “Ground Force One,” his new instrument of conquest. Obama should not be buried. He’s a political creature of immense talent while campaigning, who has so far always treated his constituents as intelligent adults, a method that has worked rather well for him. Most importantly, all the polls show that his Republican opponents are even more unpopular and discredited than he is. They are prisoners of an extremist fringe, ideologically closed to any compromise, even in the best interests of their country. This is what Obama is rightly trying to pound home, and which will eventually be heard.