What Is Left from Obama
Published in El Pais
(Spain) on 18 October 2010
by (link to original)
What goes up is inevitably doomed to fall. And the American Democratic President Barack Obama was helped up to be elected two years ago with such a frenzy of excitement and hope that it couldn’t be helped that he fell back, getting dealt a heavier fall than usual.
On Nov. 2, midterm elections will be held in the United States that allow the temperature of the political body to be taken once the president has revealed his best art, but the work from those first years can still be found floating around. And everything points to the renovation of the lower house of 435 representatives and 36 senators — a third — will suffer the most serious alteration; how he governs the remainder of the term will have to be a watermark.
So far — without a doubt — business as usual, the North American electorate is a master at clipping the wings of their presidents. But in this case, there are newly coined factors that will make the foreseeable defeat be especially full of symbolism. A popular, primitive, nativist and xenophobic movement, the tea party, only knows how to say less government, lower taxes, and down with socialism — not knowing, of course, what socialism even is (particularly the contemporary version). The tea party is gaining the size of a revolution that appears capable of taking the Republican Party from within, forcing disturbing instability into the background of the national two-party system.
It may be that Obama wasn’t exactly what a Europe ravaged by the second Bush thought that he was, and it seems clear that many Americans were not ready for a president that was so distinct, among other things so Europeanized. But the irony is that whether or not Obama was what everyone expected, his presidency has been wise enough not to satisfy the radicalism that voted for him en masse and even less to please the extreme right and illiterate who brand him as nothing less than communist. For this, his popular acceptance rate has fallen from over 70 percent of the electorate to 45 percent.
Thus, there are relatively few today that applaud health care reform that is, despite everything, a gigantic step forward in health coverage for citizens, but falls short of what Europe built after World War II; those who recognize that stood at least the first and worst hit by the financial meltdown. And in regards to foreign policy, a certain vagueness continues reigning in the same way: In Iraq and Afghanistan, one can only speak of temporary or only advertised withdrawals, while in the Middle East, stagnation is for life.
The obvious sincerity of Obama, his effort and his longing to make a better country, shouldn’t have had the last word. The time that is left until the presidential elections of 2012 will be difficult for him as well as decisive with two conflicting conceptions of a country.
On Nov. 2, midterm elections will be held in the United States that allow the temperature of the political body to be taken once the president has revealed his best art, but the work from those first years can still be found floating around. And everything points to the renovation of the lower house of 435 representatives and 36 senators — a third — will suffer the most serious alteration; how he governs the remainder of the term will have to be a watermark.
So far — without a doubt — business as usual, the North American electorate is a master at clipping the wings of their presidents. But in this case, there are newly coined factors that will make the foreseeable defeat be especially full of symbolism. A popular, primitive, nativist and xenophobic movement, the tea party, only knows how to say less government, lower taxes, and down with socialism — not knowing, of course, what socialism even is (particularly the contemporary version). The tea party is gaining the size of a revolution that appears capable of taking the Republican Party from within, forcing disturbing instability into the background of the national two-party system.
It may be that Obama wasn’t exactly what a Europe ravaged by the second Bush thought that he was, and it seems clear that many Americans were not ready for a president that was so distinct, among other things so Europeanized. But the irony is that whether or not Obama was what everyone expected, his presidency has been wise enough not to satisfy the radicalism that voted for him en masse and even less to please the extreme right and illiterate who brand him as nothing less than communist. For this, his popular acceptance rate has fallen from over 70 percent of the electorate to 45 percent.
Thus, there are relatively few today that applaud health care reform that is, despite everything, a gigantic step forward in health coverage for citizens, but falls short of what Europe built after World War II; those who recognize that stood at least the first and worst hit by the financial meltdown. And in regards to foreign policy, a certain vagueness continues reigning in the same way: In Iraq and Afghanistan, one can only speak of temporary or only advertised withdrawals, while in the Middle East, stagnation is for life.
The obvious sincerity of Obama, his effort and his longing to make a better country, shouldn’t have had the last word. The time that is left until the presidential elections of 2012 will be difficult for him as well as decisive with two conflicting conceptions of a country.