Europe from New York

NBC’s news ticker in Rockefeller Plaza reports on Merkel and the European crisis without managing to draw the attention of a Manhattan public intent these days on Christmas shopping. The European Titanic is a worry, and Obama explains that only “bow winds” from the Old Continent and the implosion of the euro could send the United States back into recession and Obama back to Chicago. Merkozy could destroy the president. Will Washington still have to play Santa Claus for Europe in a rescue operation, straight from its own pocket or via the IMF? Have we asked the Treasury Secretary to do so during his European tour?

The families of Middle America, of the Midwestern prairies, in their obligatory visit to New York, take photos of themselves in front of the Christmas tree lit up by 30,000 bulbs, planted in the Rockefeller Center. They are of the ever-shrinking middle and working classes, and Obama this week made the defending of them the watershed of his re-election campaign. In a speech in the forgotten town of Osawatomie, Kan., a tea party stronghold, he described what’s in play. It’s about knowing if “this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.” Today the answer, if not a definite no, is a little more doubtful. If in the next 12 months the situation can’t be turned around, he’s lost. He won’t be re-elected, the analysts agree. The unemployment level has dropped from 9 percent to 8.6 percent. No president, since Roosevelt during the Great Depression, has been re-elected with a level of unemployment greater than 7 percent. It’s always been the economy, stupid.

The anxiety battering at North American society is reflected in bookshops, which are ever fewer and more difficult to find in the Big Apple. Their owners complain that citizens use them mostly to leaf through new releases before buying them on Amazon. Two ideas are predominant: the decline of the United States and the threat of China. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art a fascinating exposition of Islamic art can be seen, a humbling reminder showing the formidable splendor of Asian empires from centuries ago. No domination is forever. The declinists blame Obama: socialist, feeble, continually apologizing. Some titles: “How America Fell Behind,” “Bowing to Beijing: How Barack Obama Is Hastening America’s Decline,” and “Suicide of a Superpower.” As in Reagan’s time, the right monopolizes the debate of ideas. The front cover of the most recent Foreign Affairs asks, “Is America Over?” It concludes that a rupture has been produced in the American Dream of opportunity for all. Ex-President Clinton predicts, nevertheless, that the United States will rise again. “I just know that for more than two hundred years, everyone who’s bet against the United States has lost.”

Coming from Europe it is surprising how the widely disillusion with Obama has caught on: He is spoken of with scarce respect and considered in great measure irrelevant. He is not the transformer of which we dreamed, but a cold and pragmatic politician incapable of twisting Congress’s arm as Reagan and Clinton did. He’s been in the White House for three years, and the majority of the population still doesn’t know who he is or what he wants. The growing inequality between rich and poor threatens social and political instability. Capital is systematically favored at the expense of work. The income of the richest 1 percent of the population has more than doubled in the last decade, while the median income has fallen 6 percent.

In less than a month the primaries begin, in Iowa. The Republicans are looking for the candidate that best articulates the animosity inspired by Obama. They haven’t found him or her yet. Romney, a Mormon, apparently the best positioned, hasn’t yet convinced his party. He lacks sufficient conservative credentials for the demolition of public spending, the consecration of a tax system that borders on indecent and unworkable, the demonization of Washington and the devolution of federal power to the states — the bible of nostalgic fundamentalists who dream of recovering the exceptionality of the US and its world hegemony. God’s “almost chosen people,” as Abraham Lincoln said.

An old political fox has leapt onto the stage, a precursor to the tea party, who, in the ’90s starred in a brief conservative revolution. Newt Gingrich, who [was Speaker of the] House of Representatives, has taken the lead, taking advantage of unbearably lightweight opponents. All parties have the right to suicide, as the Democrats did in 1972, when they nominated McGovern, who beat Nixon only in his home state.* This is the hope that could save Obama.

*Editor’s note: In fact, Nixon won South Dakota, McGovern’s home state.