Obama’s Coming Autumn

Obama has had a bad August and enters an autumn in which he is going to have to opt for something that, until now, he has avoided by dodging media criticism with his rhetorical magic. But in Washington, after a vacation to the exclusive island Martha’s Vineyard and an eight-month grace period, he now needs to translate the poetry of his mandate into prose. And he must do it with two life or death situations for his presidency: the war in Afghanistan, “his war,” and his stranded healthcare reform in Congress, submitted during a summer of scrutiny and massive misinformation and slander organized by rightist groups.

This has penetrated a population where the majority of people still consider the words “government” and “public” obscene. On Wednesday, Obama will go to Capitol Hill to explain to both houses of Congress that the United States needs to reform from the bottom up a system of healthcare that had originally left 46 million Americans outside of its umbrella, and threatens to hurt public accounts.

How it is possible that they [Democrats] control Congress with an absolute majority, yet President Obama’s principle reform is threatened? Many believed that the arrival of Barack meant that the United States had begun to Europeanize itself. Wrong.

Congress in Washington does not operate by party block voting like European parliaments do: Representatives think only about their reelection and not always about saving their boss already in the White House. The recession has frightened Americans who see temporary recovery through the state, but won’t allow the remote possibility that their world, genetically individualistic, might support European socialism.

Obama wants to offer it all at once: increase in coverage to almost 100 percent, reduction in healthcare costs and two options – the current private one and a public option to please unions and the Democratic left. Total consensus is impossible. Obama, in search of a compromise that makes him appear like a great unifier, could retract – to save the reform bill – the option of public health care that would compete with the private sector.

In the New York Times, Jean Edward Smith, author of the book “F.D.R.,” thinks the president should govern as he wants and should not be scared to apply the views of the wide majority against the desires of the minority. Smith asks him to do as Roosevelt did in the New Deal when he did not solicit the permission of the banks to create the SEC, the institution that today regulates excesses on Wall Street.

Afghanistan and the increasing threat of failure — as the Economist predicts — is an international test that also affects Europeans and Spain: We have deployed 1,200 of the 110,000 Western troops, and this week they have entered into combat, overshadowing anything Obama does this autumn. This could easily end up being another Vietnam for the young president. Barack considers this war “necessary” and therefore fair, unlike wars of “choice,” like in Iraq. In August he reaffirmed in front a group of veterans that “Afghanistan is not only a war worth fighting. It is essential for the defense of our people.”

Didn’t Obama already end the unending war on terrorism declared by Bush and the neocons? The objectives for the war are confusing and not understood by North American and European public, seeing as the leaders of Al Qaeda are in Pakistan. The elections have been a disaster; Karzai, surrounded by narc-traffickers and warlords, lacks legitimacy and presides over a corrupt government; the Taliban insurgency is becoming bolder and ever more prepared; the protection of the Afghan population would require 500,000 soldiers (one for every 50 inhabitants); the United States military thinks that the Taliban is already psychologically and geographically gaining ground, and for them winning comes down to just not losing. The Pentagon is about to ask Obama to allow a military escalation.

In the U.S. they believe, even among Democrats, that this war is unwinnable and are requesting a timetable for withdrawal. Conservative columnist George F. Will recommends to Obama the words of De Gaulle, who refers to the decision made by Otto Von Bismarck in 1870 to stop German troops at the gates of Paris. He said, “Genius sometimes consists of knowing when to stop.”