Barack Obama’s Past Grace

Eight months is short. Barack Obama still has 40 ahead of him to complete his term as brightly as he started it. But, for now, the state of grace is behind him. Domestically, the extension of medical coverage for the most destitute – this reform that was to be his great work – is, all at once, coming up against the mobilization of the Republican right, the lobbying of private insurers, and the Democratic left, disappointed that its president did not even attempt to take inspiration from European social security systems.

Barack Obama has, without doubt, already failed to become a new Roosevelt, the architect of a social New Deal that would not have increased health expenses but would have offered protection against illness to the nearly 60 million Americans who are without it. Now, nothing more than a bad compromise is in the offing – better than nothing – but a mini-reform, badly constructed and extremely costly, at a time when saving the banks and the automobile industry has increased the budget deficit. Polls are becoming worrying for the White House. Uncertainty is taking hold domestically and, at the same time, the horizon is darkening on foreign fronts.

In Iraq, relations between the Shi’ite, Sunni, and Kurdish communities are becoming strained again, because agreement on the distribution of petroleum revenues is taking a long time to complete. Violence has picked up again. It is no longer impossible that the United States might have to recall its troops into the midst of chaos, though the increasing appeasement of the last two years had let them believe that they could withdraw in dignity. Duty calling, Obama would then have to take on this national humiliation, as a result of which his authority at home and abroad would suffer. And, on top of this, nothing is working out in Afghanistan, either. There, participation in the presidential election was as small as the assumptions of fraud are large. It is no longer clear who would restore, on what bases and how, a semblance of peace in this country, which is more than ever divided between the Tajik North and the Pashtun South – where the Taliban reign as masters.

The path is bad for Barack Obama, because, weakened in such a way, he finds himself in the international limelight again. From Jerusalem to Tehran, via Moscow, Beijing, Paris, London, and Berlin, all the capitals that count are in the process of telling themselves that they should not have to worry about him too much, that their hands are free, and this neither helps him to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process nor to make progress with Iran.

One year after having won the Democratic nomination and sparked such great hopes throughout the world, this president must re-frame his action, define priorities, and score concrete success that would reverse the trend, but can he? That’s the biggest question this fall, because Barack Obama is coming up against three fundamental difficulties – economic, personal, and historic.

The first is that no one yet knows if the economic crisis has passed its peak or if it has only gone through a first phase, precursor to an otherwise more violent rebound. In the first hypothesis, Barack Obama will be the savior of America, and the present moment, quickly forgotten. In the second, he will be blamed for everything and its opposite, for not having done enough to get things back on the right track and for having put the country into too much debt.

This president’s second difficulty is that everyone has made him out to be a born peacemaker, quicker to understand the reasons of the other side than to adopt a clear point of view. Black and White, American and African, coming from a modest family but propelled by his intelligence into the most closed, elite circles, he has always so deeply wanted to fit into every milieu and known so well how to make himself accepted that everything leads him to search for consensus, to attempt to win over his adversaries, rather than to break them. This depth marks all his speeches, that on race in America, as well as the address to the Muslim world, and possibly makes him more of an analyst of amazing accuracy, rather than a single-minded man of government.

As for the third difficulty of Barack Obama, it is that of America. With the he USSR gone, it first thought, under Bill Clinton, that it could impose itself as a single power, by sole virtue of its victory, its virtues and its wealth. September 11 disabused it of this notion. Under George W. Bush, it believed that it could bank only on the its force of arms. With its successor, it has wagered on a return to its moral roots and on good will – the soft power of the extended hand – but the results are, to this day, not more convincing.

In fact, America can only carry weight today by combining its power with others, by choosing the allies with which it will jointly make decisions, but this idea is still so foreign that even a visionary like Barack Obama has not yet envisioned it. There is still time.