Barack Obama Confronted by a Disillusioned America

A few weeks before the midterm elections in the United States, many elected Democrats prefer to distance themselves from Barack Obama. Too intellectual, little talent for empathy, the president has disappointed.

In the state of Kentucky, the Democratic candidate Alison Grimes, who is running against the leader of the Republican minority in the Senate Mitch McConnell, refuses to say who she voted for in the 2012 presidential elections. Admitting that she supported Barack Obama could cost her victory.

Two weeks before the midterm elections of Nov. 4, there is no haste in the Democratic camp to ask for the president’s personal support in the campaign. Despite his unquestionable charisma and his two more-than-comfortable electoral successes in 2008 and 2012, the president who aroused the most enthusiasm and hope in the recent history of the United States would now almost be treated as a plague victim, a lost cause. How do you explain the strength of this “Obama bashing,” so difficult to accept on this side of the Atlantic, and especially in France? Wasn’t our country [France] initially asking whether a “French-like Obama” was possible or whether it would remain an elusive dream? What part do the justified criticisms and unjust reproaches play in this brutal display of lack of love by his fellow citizens for the first black president of the United States?

“Obama knows how to win an election, he doesn’t know how to govern,” one of my representatives, who is a Democrat and who carried out important duties under the administration of Bill Clinton, told me in Washington last week. He was the first person since February 2009 to express his doubts to me. The president spoke too much and did too little. The exceptional speaker already took precedence over the politician. For my representative, after six years of exercising power, Obama’s flaws were worsened rather than reduced. Like George W. Bush before him, Barack Obama surrounded himself for his second mandate with men and women chosen more for their loyalty than for their quality.

He said that this is particularly true on the subject of foreign policy. His National Security Advisor Susan Rice seems more interested in the decision process than in the content of the foreign policy. She is particularly inconspicuous. Secretary of State John Kerry is more present. But does he have the strategic thought that is worthy of this name? In other words, a president who has difficulty making decisions appears weakened rather than strengthened by the team that surrounds him. After Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, his last secretary of defense, multiplied the criticisms of the president he is serving in the memoir [he wrote] that is coming out in the United States. These criticisms delight the American media, pleased to see a Democrat criticize his own side. According to Panetta, Obama’s America was so eager to close the chapter on its presence in Iraq, it gave up without much resistance to the pressures from the al-Maliki government, without worrying about the United States’ true interests and [the plight of] Iraq. And what is there to say about the rapid changes — the hesitation of the president in Syria, from which he withdrew after having set a “red line” over the Damascus regime, and relying on a negative vote by the British House of Commons to legitimize a non-intervention that had been perceived all over the world as proof that America was no longer America?

The criticism is simple; the art, especially that of governing, is always more difficult.

How do you deal on an international scale with the Middle East which, after the fleeting hope of the Arab Spring, entered into a phase of deconstruction? How do you deal with a public opinion that is so volatile and so troubled, and according to which the Islamic State threat seems to have little to do with Ebola? Hasn’t the American opinion been “Europeanized,” in the sense that it still intends to further protect itself from the world rather than act on it?

Also, regarding the domestic plan, how do you handle a country that has never been the “focus point” and that has never known such defiance with regards to their rulers and politics?

This is what explains the lack of passion regarding the midterm elections. Anyway, unless something unexpected happens, the Democrats should lose the majority in the two chambers and the Republicans will be defeated anew during the presidential elections of 2016! Are they not incapable of overcoming their differences and settling on an eligible candidate, contrary to the Democratic Party, which seems to have already rallied behind Hillary Clinton’s banner? For lack of power to reform a political system that is on its last legs, in which the “vetocracy” — to reuse the slogan of the political commentator Francis Fukuyama — prevails over democracy, America favors the symbols: the first woman after the first black! Candidate of hope in 2009, Obama found himself incapable of containing a culture of fear that seems to prevail over everything. It is true that Obama, intellectual, reserved, remarkably lacking empathy for all that does not concern part of his inner circle, without a doubt found himself in power at the wrong moment, too early for his personal development, too late for the evolution of the world.

And what if America, at this double crossroads, internally and externally, had the need for a more intuitive, more optimistic, less intellectual and just simply more political president? Some people in the United States stop short of alluding, almost with nostalgia, to the personality of Ronald Reagan. Did he no longer have this unique quality in politics that is called luck?

To be fair, Obama, through his reform of the health system [known as] “Obamacare,” has still changed the lives of millions of Americans for the better. History will thank him.