Obama, the Strongest Legacy of Scandals

Ugly days for American President Barack Obama: The Republicans accuse him of not protecting Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other American officials from being killed; the conservative tea party is furious because its funding has been held at gunpoint by the U.S. government’s tax agency, the Internal Revenue Service; even the liberal “Praetorian Guard” of the White House has complained about the Department of Justice’s nosy behavior in relation to the seizure of Associated Press phone records.

Whether real or alleged, every president in their second term is a victim of scandals, while the opposition, and a petulant press incapable of constructive analysis and criticism, just tries to limit the work being done. Before Monica Lewinsky was in the picture, President Bill Clinton and his wife were tortured with speculation in Arkansas regarding the Whitewater case, which nobody really understood. Reagan offered a cake to Iran’s ayatollahs in the wretched Iran-Contra affair. Bush Jr. was crucified because of the flood in New Orleans caused by Hurricane Katrina.

Distraught Republicans are actually asking for Obama’s impeachment.

It will be tough, as only two presidents have been impeached in the more than 200-year history of the republic: Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Clinton in 1998, and they were both acquitted. The burst of scandals serves as an agenda to keep the president in check, cripple health care reform, and stop both immigration reform and his agenda for the working class.

How will the White House react? Cerebral, detached and Hamlet-like, Barack Obama has so far managed to evade nonpartisan critics, both in the United States and in Europe. Denounced by the right wing as a “socialist” and praised by his supporters as a “true liberal,” Obama is instead only a moderate centrist. In his books, he encourages the end of political clashes in the United States and rebukes minorities for their cult of victimhood. “Pull your pants up, brothers,” and go to work, he admonishes young African- Americans.

As for foreign policy, after the magnificent speech in 2009 at Al-Azhar University in Cairo in which he promised to “reset” dialogue with Muslims, greeting them with “As-salaam alaikum,” Obama has ordered more missile drone raids than those ordered under “the hawk,” Bush Jr. Republicans have a hard time trying to depict him as a leftist because Obama thinks like most Americans: We should leave Iraq and Afghanistan, may God save us from intervening in Syria and we should hit terrorists with remote-controlled robots without putting our soldiers’ lives at risk. It seems difficult to sustain that this position is “liberal,” but the president’s charm serves as cosmetic politics.

In the now out of print “Conflict in the Shadows,“ James Eliot Cross had already predicted in 1963 that bombings remove the local populations’ trust: “Aviation is too quick for ‘political’ wars; there is no distinction between the enemy combatant and the innocent civilian man and woman even if soldiers make themselves seen by waving their rifles. The loss of civilian support in bombings weighs more than any success against ousted guerrillas.”*

Cross, a top expert on counterinsurgency, was referring to Vietnam, but his words now weigh heavy on Obama. At the same time, how can a president be depicted as “weak” when he throws missile drones from the White House like Zeus threw thunderbolts from Mount Olympus?

Barring unexpected events, Obama will probably get away with it all. His inability to “make politics” within Congress is now clearly established, as it garners Republican votes — for example in the worthy but failed reform of the Second Amendment right to bear arms — with Lincoln’s patience and humility, as portrayed recently in Spielberg’s beautiful movie. Obama’s irritated rivals and baffled supporters will both end up losing track of the grade history will award Barack Obama. His charisma is not reflected in the approved reforms, but the president — thanks to the rational understanding of the 21st century United States, identified via Big Data collected by his collaborators — has changed the nature of United States politics. Today, the Democratic Party has dominance over both coasts’ modernizing urban classes, women and emigrants, which form the future majority. Dullness on the part of the Republicans relegates them to a minor party position, one in which the Democrats languished from 1968 to 1988, winning not only once in twenty 20 years, but also badly with Carter.

Back then, Democrats used to select radical candidates for the primaries and ended up being beaten by centrists in the presidential race, but now the same destiny is faced by Republicans, who if not for the whims of the tea party, would control the Senate.

This historic legacy inherited by Obama leaves the party, not the country, with a new social coalition. With the exception of Eisenhower’s moderate centrist spells, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s coalition kept Democrats in the White House from 1933 to 1968 thanks to workers, intellectuals, minorities and trade unions. Obama picks up minorities, “near majorities,” the technologically savvy, women and cities. Nixon turned the tables and gave to centrist Republicans of the Grand Old Party a generation of hegemony with whites in the South and workers hostile to 1968: How long will it take for his heirs to beat the extremist right wing and restart dialogue with Hispanics and liberated women?

According to many observers, Obama’s line-up will last at least one generation. I think that the progressive-conservative pendulum that the historian Arthur Schlesinger considered the symbol of American politics does not move to the languid blues rhythm of Ella Fitzgerald anymore, but to the frenetic cadence of rapper Nas. Obama has revolutionized America’s political sheet music and will survive the troubles he faces today. Republicans will, however, end up learning how to play — in a musical way — the Hispanic salsa, tracks from the televised singing competition “The Voice,” loved by young people, and African-American rap. But so far, the conducting baton of the American Great Orchestra remains in the hands of Conductor Obama.

*Editor’s note: This quote, accurately translated, could not be sourced.