No, President Obama, You Can’t Do Everything

No, he can’t. It was humiliating for him. But it is not an “Apocalypse Now” for President Obama and even less so for the country. On Tuesday the American voters made a course correction and removed the Democratic Party from power in the House of Representatives. The Republicans made significant advances, but did not manage to take over the Senate. There is no way to sugarcoat this pill. It will be more difficult for the president to smile now, as there is a lot of mud in his path as he heads towards 2012. The Republican Ronald Reagan and the Democrat Bill Clinton both survived legislative disasters in their first term and were reelected with comfortable margins.

But going back to that smile. In his next State of the Union speech, in the beginning of the coming year, Obama will have behind him the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, instead of the Democrat Nancy Pelosi, although Vice President Joe Biden will still be the leader of the Senate. The Democrats have taken a beating and the voters have weakened Obama’s mandate in the middle of his first presidential term. This is not the same as conferring a mandate to the Republicans.

It was a punishing vote, a painful ear-pulling for a president who was a little too ambitious and a party that went too far. The Democrats paid the price for leftist legislative leadership in a country with a population that is moderately conservative and has a schizophrenic relationship with its government. They do not trust in it, but are not prepared to make the necessary sacrifice of cuts in benefits. Clearly it was hopeless. No Savior or Virgin Mary could stop the disaster, facing the current state of the economy, with unemployment bordering on 10 percent and not below 8 percent as the White House projected for election time.

The furious insurgents of the tea party (the most conservative sector of the Republicans) had some spectacular victories, but now the challenge for the Republican establishment will be to tame the beast. In the swinging pendulum of American politics, Americans do not want to dismantle the federal government as the tea party fervently desires. It is a movement that suffers from the same delirium as those who believed in the most optimistic messages of hope and change from Obama two years ago.

This business of reinventing the country is complicated. The Obama group thought that they would put in place a golden realignment of the party in 2008 with progressive ideas, the same delusion that George W. Bush’s Republican group had in the previous cycle. The Obama coalition was fragile, and it is worth noting the defection of the independents. That is a warning for Republicans. A significant chunk of the electorate did not support the conservatives. They threw in with the liberals. The demographics also help Obama, but right now young people are not showing as much enthusiasm for the president as they did in 2008.

On the Republican side there was more enthusiasm and anger. But the best definition of the state of the nation is anxiety. Right now there are unstable political attitudes. It is an era of volatility. It has been more than a half century since we have seen a game of musical chairs in Congress as intense as that of the last 18 years. Strictly speaking, both parties are going down simultaneously. The voters gave their votes to the Republicans on Wednesday, but they have little love for the party. Indeed, there is a bastion of resistance within the party, the tea party, that considers the Republican leadership to be as corrupt and flawed as that of the Democrats.

We can only hope that in the long term the American sense of optimism prevails. In its editorial this week, The Economist magazine published an ode to the United States, saying that, in spite of its problems, this is the country that still has the most innovative economy in the world, a talented president and is still a magnet for immigrants from all over the world. Two years ago, it was Barack Obama’s triumph, the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas. In this election cycle, we have ascending stars from the Republican Party, like the senator elected in Florida, Marco Rubio, the son of exiled Cubans, and Nikki Haley, governor-elect in South Carolina, daughter of Indians. In the midst of internal tensions and political volatility, Americans still show their vigor and dynamism.