White House: Race to Disappointment

It’s been a while since European politics engaged in one of its favorite role plays: “the American lesson” — that is, the exegesis of the common destiny of the West from an Atlanticist perspective. Understandably. Focusing on the crisis within European borders seems to have demoted the allied United States to the role of comprimario. And yet the vicissitudes of Obama, elected as one of the most popular presidents in the history of the United States, and today having to fight for a difficult re-election, constitute in effect an exemplary account of how the economic crisis is forcing politics to change — all over our world.

The path of the U.S. president tells us, meanwhile, that at the first contact with a hard, steadfast and indisputable reality — that is, the economic crisis — all that “communicative froth” that so many leaders of past decades have been fed vaporizes, like bubbles in the air. Theories on personal charisma, on the emotive-emotional relationship between leader and voters, on messages and community, on symbols and identification, reveal themselves for what they are: matter for plentiful times.

What has happened to Obama in the course of these past years is much simpler than one would imagine. Under the freezing wind of the crisis, his “magical” talent for lifting spirits, mobilizing and motivating, have proven to be irrelevant. Like any other president, black or white, handsome or not, innovator or conservative, today, he too, in scarce times, must respond to a single demand: What proposals have you for bringing us back to comfort?

It happened to Obama; it happened in Italy, notably (but not solely) to Silvio Berlusconi. It is happening to Cameron as well as to Sarkozy — and if there is an advantage that singles out Ms. Merkel, it is that of always having stuck to the “basics.” And yet, it is notable that we refuse to take action. Years of [Marshall] McLuhan (wasted) have not prepared any leader for the worst.

But politics stripped of its “communicative” arts does justice also to a series of concepts that until now have been the axis of every good government manual. In this, too, the experience of Obama has set the pace.

The strong economic polarization spurred by the crisis has in fact destroyed the conviction — in the U.S., as with us — that the winner is whomever conquers the middle class, identified too with the middle ground. An idea with a solid foundation since the last half-century, no Democratic candidate has won without sweeping 60 percent of the moderate votes. But how does one now define a middle class in rapid impoverishment; and, consequently, what does moderate mean?

These are the dilemmas that the president of the United States finds himself already tackling. Measures that at the start of his term he calmly could have passed as acts of social reform (the most important to remember is certainly health care reform) have proven to be a battlefield that has alienated a good majority of the middle class. And, for the same reason, interventions that should have passed as supporting the middle class (we are thinking here of the bailout of certain big financial institutions and the aid to overcome the housing bubble crisis) have proven to be a poisoned fruit that ultimately divided the moderates.

Few cases are more revealing than the complicated relationship that the United States and its president have developed in the past years with Wall Street. During the “Hope and Change” campaign of 2008, Obama collected more contributions from the financial sector than all politicians in the history of the United States. According to data from Reuters, Wall Street gave Obama 20 percent of his funding. And at the top of the donor list were names such as Goldman Sachs, AIG, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup — the same names that were found, just a few weeks after the election, at the center of the worst economic crisis experienced in recent years. And their bailout, at the hands of the White House, has remained from then on shrouded in a cloud of doubt, becoming ever more dense with the discontent within the country against that same Wall Street identified as the origin of all the problems. A perfect parable for understanding why Obama’s presidency is for the most part crushed, although Obama himself has not changed.

The president who faces the re-election of 2012 is therefore a man who is no longer at the head of the transformation, but rather is at the tail. He is no longer the perfect standard-bearer for any cause: he is too radical for some and not radical enough for others. And the country that he leads is, as a whole, much unhappier and much more radicalized than ours — a state in which the seeds of a possible populism are much more developed than those we see today in Europe. Of all the warnings that we can derive from the affair of Obama, this is perhaps the one to heed most.