Has Obama Finally Found His Mojo?

With his health care reform, the American president has gotten out of his rut.

Barack Obama needed to recuperate. The adoption of the health care reform, which allows 31 million additional people to benefit from medical coverage, has possibly opened the way to recovery. It has certainly not transformed America into a social republic, but it has the dynamic of movement without which his term would be lost. In leaving the rut where conservative groups and Republicans had him stuck, the American president has carried out a sort of catharsis.

This reform was the quintessential moment of a presidency that began in 2009.

First, he revealed the vices of American democracy, often the prey of lobbyists and pressure groups that had to be persuaded one by one, as one carefully cuts the wires of a bomb to deactivate it. No reform is possible without working the elected bodies, without doling out compensation and caresses. Everyone knew this already, but this time, the opposition hardened, revenge for a presidential campaign during which John McCain was judged too harshly. The tenors of deep populism — what we would bluntly call “the extreme right” in Europe— have taken off the gloves in comparing Obama to Hitler. The radicalization of the Republican Party remains a fact on which one must now count.

Then, Obama re-launched his grand presidential plan. Nothing is exaggerated in saying that this reform was the quintessential moment for the president since his inauguration in 2009. Something that no other American president could manage to achieve in half a century, in a good year or a bad year, saw the day. This is not only a Democratic victory; it is a victory for Obamaism. The moral and humanistic discourse, which elected the intellectual from Chicago, renews a hopeful perspective, where the administrative realities have left only a few illusions. “We have proved that we are still a people capable of big things,” declared Obama, linking his health reform to a patriotic objective.

Finally, a few months from the congressional elections, the American president has above all demonstrated that he knows how to stay the course and keep his word while defying unpopularity, a skill that he will need.