Yes, He Still Can

The president who captured the White House by the force of his charisma and promise of change currently finds himself under siege and in a hostile political-economic environment. Nevertheless, he still has more than a year until the coming elections to convince the public to stand behind him.

In his monologue a week ago, night talk-show host Conan O’Brien told about the “drama at the White House this week when a man tried to hurl himself over the fence. But the Secret Service intervened and talked the president into going back inside and finishing his term.”

Barack Obama feels under siege, and sees doors slammed around him and a hostile political-economic environment. Obama has learned that life in the transparent aquarium called the White House is not so nice when everybody sticking to the glass hits it to see how scared the dweller gets.

But let there be no doubt: Obama knew perfectly well what he was getting into in 2008. Ironically, it was the Wall Street collapse in September 2008, with the downfall of the Lehman Brothers investment bank, that guaranteed his victory in the elections once and for all.

The 2008-2009 recession and the breakdown of the American economic model is the heritage Obama received from George W. Bush, along with $12 trillion in debt; two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq; a nuclear North Korea; Iran probably on its way to the same status; a divided, dysfunctional, polarized and poisonous political system; and an America in a culture war.

No Supernatural Forces in America

Obama realized then that the economy is stronger than the politics inside the United States and the 21st-century world as a whole. Obama does not come from Wall Street, nor from professional or cultural-moral perspectives. He supports more government involvement in regulation, stimulus packages and services to citizens. He believes in health reform, education reform and significant improvement of infrastructure and technology. He believes that government is not always the problem nor the market always the solution; it is not always true that the market is smart and the government is stupid.

But he also looked closely at America in 2008 and from that point understood very well that there was no chance he would be able to reverse the economy’s direction. After all, he is the president of the United States of America, not Captain America. He has the greatest potential power in world history, but there are no supernatural forces in America.

The basics of political leadership are 5,000 years old; add updates and cultural changes, the growth of the modern nation state, the development of advanced forms of communication technologies, and we start from Demosthenes’ speeches in the town square and finish with the Internet. Moses, Napoleon, Lenin and Winston Churchill did not have TVs, but the fundamentals of their leadership are based on the same elements.

And still, high quality political leadership is more than a sum of all of its components. It consists of the ability to evoke trust, to persuade, to guide, to coin a phrase, to say difficult and complicated words in a way that the public understands and accepts. Leadership is the ability to grant confidence, to convey inspiration, to design and implement a vision. Leadership is also charisma, that trait impossible to acquire and define accurately, but without which one could perhaps govern, but not lead.

The Wrong Track Is the Economic One

First of all, leadership is the ability to prioritize, to create the priority list comprising ideas you bring to the board, the scope of the mandate you get from the electorate, the ability to know what the public needs without belittling the things it wants and to read and perceive reality. Here, it appears, lies Obama’s political and leadership mistake — the one that drags behind itself the horribly premature and exaggerated disappointment and eulogies of recent days.

Obama was elected for his theme of “change.” “Yes, we can,” went the motto. Change was a platform. Not a revolutionary change in America, not a revision of the principles and social-political economic philosophy that had been the foundation of the American Republic for 235 years, but a shift of priorities and shift of direction on the economic issue.

And altogether, “direction” is the key word examined in each poll. “Is America headed in the right direction?” Americans are asked. The average of the polls on this question in August shows that 73.8 percent of Americans think that America is on the wrong track, while only 18.5 percent opine that America is indeed [moving] in the right direction.

The wrong direction is the economic one. Instead of addressing it, Obama opted to bring about a fundamental change in the subject matter vital for him and for most of his voters, but one not yet urgent in 2009. Insurance and health care reform had the intrinsic potential to produce political conflict and rally the Republicans.

The Timing Is After the President

The subject is right, the need is certain — how is the United States going to thrive in the 21st century with 27 million lacking health insurance? The priority was wrong and the timing is after Obama. If we play with a variety of the polls’ statistics, we see an odd phenomena: Obama was elected by 53 percent.

His average approval rating in the last week stands at 43 percent Gallup’s weekend poll shows that for the first time Obama is going down to below 40 percent. On the other hand, the rate of sympathy the Americans feel for Obama is at 65 percent, including 22 percent of those not satisfied with his job (65 percent minus 43 percent).

12 percent of those who did not vote for him like him, or at least have faith in the guy and the sincerity of his intentions, even if they do not support his policy — and in the politics of the presidential elections, that’s an important figure. The level of support for the functioning of Congress stands at 17 percent. These supporters may be the same optimists or fools who are positive that America is heading in the right direction.

Another survey reveals that about 60 percent of Americans and 33 percent of Republicans are of opinion that Obama inherited the financial crises and the problems of the debt and budget deficit and do not consider him guilty of their creation or aggravation.

The political translation of the polls is still unclear. On the surface, Obama has a problem in nine states that he won in the last elections where Bush won in 2004. The degree of disappointment with him from independents, who constitute nearly 40 percent of Americans, is large and keeps growing. These seem to be all the earmarks of a one-term president.

On the other hand, the Republicans are entrenching in the right-wing conservative districts, which is not a realistic strategy to run the country, and elections are still more than a year away. Obama could still initiate a major principal quarrel with the Republicans: employment and unemployment instead of an obsessive focus on the deficit. There is no formula for success, but, eventually, the Americans will make out a clear list of priorities, and that translates into leadership.