Obama’s Resurrection

The unusual expectations raised by Barack Obama when he became president have faded considerably over the year now ending. The November midterm elections were a bump to the president and his party, which ended up as minority in the House of Representatives. Obama himself acknowledged that he had had “a tough election.”

Many political analysts changed their minds. The Messiah seemed a bit “groggy,” and it wouldn’t be easy for him to recover. His political plans blew up.

The reality of these two months has not been, however, so bleak for Obama. The president has garnered several flashy successes. There was an initial setback. A judge declared unconstitutional an important provision of the health care reform: the one that requires citizens to get a private health care policy. Opponents of the president jumped for joy, but the White House didn’t seem excessively concerned. The reform doesn’t take effect until 2014, and Democrats think that in these two years the legal battle, which should get to the Supreme Court, will lean toward the administration and those who defend the constitutionality of the law, even though it is now viewed with increasing skepticism by the public. The vital and urgent need for general health insurance in a developed country hasn’t gotten to the very heart of the United States.

The good news has accumulated in recent weeks. Obama reached an important budget agreement with the Republicans, and though he had to make significant concessions, those were inevitable due to the new seat distribution of the houses. Public opinion felt satisfied. Later, the president was able to find cracks in the Republican ranks to pass an international treaty and an outdated measure. Thirteen Republicans switched to the Democratic ranks to ratify an important and strategic arms-reduction treaty with Russia, and another 23 supported the abolition of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy affecting military service members and applicants.

These three accomplishments have clearly proven popular in public opinion. The president got a lifeline, and his approval rate went from 45 percent to 48 percent in the polls — a modest number for someone who began his term at 69 percent, but something that Zapatero, Sarkozy or Berlusconi can look at jealously. Or even the United States Congress, which comes in at 19 percent. Obama, despite his decline, remains the country’s most admired politician. He’s not, by any means, knocked out.

All wrapped up in realism, as with the budgetary issue, Obama will have to step back with regard to the issue of Guantanamo. The detention center cannot be closed, even though he promised to do so within a year in January 2009. The number of inmates has decreased — now to 174, many of them Yemenis — but the problem is that there is nowhere to place them. U.S. allies are miserly when it comes to hosting terrorism suspects. Congress just passed a defense spending bill in December that put sweeping restrictions on detainee transfers from Guantanamo to the U.S.; and, this is the crux of the issue, the Obama administration, like — oh, good Lord! — the Bush administration, is reluctant to judge the prisoners considered terrorists without sufficient facts that can be displayed in public without endangering the safety of others or of intelligence operations. That’s why Obama keeps them in the limbo of Guantanamo. The Pentagon indicated that this decision affects 48 of the prisoners.

The government will pass an act that recognizes the right of detainees to challenge custody in these hazy conditions, but the closing down of the center in Cuba is now postponed sine die. This delay won’t affect Obama’s popularity at all. We know that the American legal system transparently states that a person has to be either tried or released, but in the case of terrorists, citizens have no qualms about looking the other way.

Finally, we can affirm that the leaks from WikiLeaks have caused no outcry in the United States. Its diplomacy, it’s being said, has ended up strengthened. But there were a few guffaws because of the revealed behavior of some foreign leaders, including our own.