The End of the Obama Phenomenon

This week, on the 400 kilometers of highway from Toledo to Pittsburg, arguments in the U.S. electoral campaign were revealed, some uncertainties regarding their results were considered, and above all, one reality was confirmed: The Obama phenomenon, that huge wave of popular affection that surprised the world four years ago, is dying, if not already buried forever. For the first time since he arrived in the White House, the President went on the road Thursday and Friday in Ohio and Pennsylvania, both of great significance to the ballot box, ready to repeat his best moments as an apostle of hope. But in the end, everything was reduced to a routine exercise in order to solicit votes.

That is not necessarily an election prognosis. Barack Obama still has enough fuel (and reasons) to be reelected. The opinion polls even favor him, and the election calculations continue to bet that he will be victorious in November. However, he will achieve the win with very different weapons than those he used in 2008. The mysticism, illusion, euphoria and faith—all of those qualities outside of politics that elevated Obama in the past—have evaporated. Today, the North American president is a conventional politician. Time and the voters will decide if he is better or worse than his opponent, but both are equally mortal.

After three and a half years of an irregular presidency with great triumphs, including health reform and the death of Osama bin Laden, and some flaws, especially the fact that the economic stimulus plan of 2009 did not achieve the predicted results, the wearing down of Obama is observed by more than just his graying hair. His speech has become monotone and barely convincing; his dialectic—essentially, let’s stop the Right—is pretty rudimentary. And his largest problem is that this exhaustion is also seen in his supporters, wrapped in a halo of

melancholy of what could not be or what was not.

Since I began following Obama in the middle of 2007, I never saw him with an audience of less than several thousand, and in many occasions, tens of thousands. In the four of the five rallies in which he participated at the end of this week, the audience barely reached a few hundred. Only in Pittsburgh, favored by the youthful scene at Carnegie Mellon University, did the audience reach 5,000 people, according to official figures distributed by the Obama campaign.

In that last rally, Obama stated the phrase that currently defines the United States: “And if you still believe in me like I believe in you, I hope you will stand with me in 2012.” Can they continue to believe in him? Can workers continue to believe in Obama despite unemployment that remains at 8.2 percent? Can Hispanics continue to believe in Obama despite his uncompleted promise to pass an immigration law? Can the Left continue to believe in Obama after he kept Guantanamo open and increased the amount of indiscriminate, deadly attacks by unmanned airplanes? Can independents continue to believe in Obama when the public deficit has tripled? Can the youth continue to believe in Obama, overwhelmed by their student loans and frustrated by the lack of progress in the development of clean energy? Can all of those who aspire towards the American Dream believe in Obama with a future so uncertain in an economy that has barely grown at a pace of two percent?

Obviously, those whose response to these questions is negative will also have to consider the alternative. Mitt Romney has his own serious limitations, beginning with his own uncertainty. David Axelrod, the director of the Obama campaign, has said that the Republican candidate is “the most secretive candidate that we’ve seen, frankly, since Richard Nixon.” And he’s not wrong. With respect to practically every significant topic of national worry, Romney has not expressed until now anything more than either vacillations or blatant contradictions.

However, this go-around is here to define Obama, not Romney, and this is what Obama has tried to do. One of his arguments is that “we’re on the right track, my economic policies are working, we still have a long way to go but stick with me and you’ll be fine.” Indeed, although a president has never been elected with an unemployment rate similar to the present, it has been 28 months since Obama inherited the worst economic crisis seen in 80 years. As he himself remembered relentlessly in Ohio, whose progress is tightly linked to the automobile industry, his decision to rescue the Big Three car companies based in Detroit has allowed the companies to earn profit once again and to create, although timidly, employment. As Obama did this, Romney published an article in The New York Times in 2008 with a clearly explicit title: “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”

Many of the people who were in Maumee, Sandusky, or Parma, listening to Obama, admitted that they would vote for the president as a thank-you for having saved the industry that employed their parents and themselves and that they trust will also be able to employ their children. Although other factors also influence the vote, Romney has made his victory in Ohio an uphill battle, where he is now behind Obama by nine points, according to the most recent polls. And if he doesn’t manage to win Ohio, it’s difficult to imagine how he will win the presidency. One must remember that the elections in the United States are not national elections; there are 50 elections, one in every state. Forty are practically already decided in favor of one candidate or the other. Everything is played out in about a dozen states, of which Obama currently has the advantage in eight.

In any case, four months of campaigning can change these limited advantages. However, for that to occur, there needs to be a majority and a resounding rejection of the President, or better, his rival needs to succeed in generating a strong current of illusion. Neither of these two conditions is occurring at the moment.

It’s generally established that the candidates don’t win elections. Rather governmental leaders lose them. Just in case, Obama has also commissioned himself to discover the supposed intentions of his rival: “[…] I don’t think that Mr. Romney’s plan to spend trillions of dollars more on tax cuts for folks who don’t need them and aren’t even asking for them is the right way to grow our economy, especially since they want to pay for it by cutting education spending and cutting job training programs and raising middle-class taxes.” The President has caricatured the Republican candidate as a millionaire. Regarding to paying taxes, Obama has said, “And I sure know Mr. Romney can do a little more,” with Romney insensitive to the difficulties faced by workers and the inheritor of the same economical politics that created the 2008 disaster. “We tried [the Republicans’ economic plan] and it didn’t work. So why would we want to go backwards to the same theory that didn’t work before?”

On the other hand, Obama presents himself as the defender of the middle class. “I believe with every fiber of my being that a strong economy comes not from the top down, but from a strong middle class.”

“And I told you, I would wake up every single day, fighting as hard as I knew how for you, to make your lives a little bit better, to give you more of a fighting shot to succeed and live out your dreams.” The president says that he represents authentic American values, not those of becoming rich at any cost, which have been predominant in the last years, but rather those of a united society. “The reason we built the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge, the reason we sent a man to the moon, or invested in the research that resulted in the Internet, the reason we built an Interstate Highway System — we did those things not for any individual to become rich; we did it so that all of would have a platform for success, because we understand there are some things we do better together.”

Obama admits that he has not achieved everything that he promised: “We’ve been successful in moving us in the right direction, but we still have a long way to go.” However, he believes that a good part of the responsibility of that outcome belongs to the Republicans: “[We] haven’t gotten the Republicans to engage on a whole range of issues. That, I wish had happened.” The most resounding example of that is the health care reform, used by the opposition as the clearest example of Obama’s supposedly socialist plan. The President has gone some time without speaking of the issue, which had been determined to be unpopular in the majority of the population. However, the Supreme Court approved the law last week, the polls have begun to turn markedly in favor of the initiative, and Obama now displays his “pride” for having signed it into law.

The need of a new healthcare model in the United States is resounding. In Sandusky, Ohio, Obama conversed with a woman who, with tears in her eyes, told the President that her sister had died of cancer six months before because the insurance company had denied coverage for the disease’s expensive treatment. The President has reason to show off his success. However, if he barely has done that until now, it is because the survey-takers had recommended it.

In this too, Obama has become an ordinary politician. Efficiency rules above ideas, and election priorities stay above everything else. Among the useful instruments for success that Obama has in his hands, there is his own position. The bus that took Obama across the highways of Ohio and Pennsylvania displayed on its front and sides the presidential seal, an emblem that still means something for North Americans. Black with spectacular armor plating, that bus was itself a symbol of the power of this nation. Obama has rightly managed this power with external politics in which he has combined strength and patience, so that the country can recuperate its prestige lost in the previous presidency. His compatriots support these politics, and this is another trick for the Democratic candidate. But much campaigning remains ahead. Many things can still occur, and Obama does not have the same magic in order to avoid obstacles. In 2008, John McCain had to battle against a magical being. This time, it’s a fight of man against man.