Barack Obama and the Bad Boys of the Tea Party

A vote to end the federal shutdown was passed, but the debate regarding the national debt has only been postponed. And President Barack Obama must face up to some particularly hard-liner adversaries.

Obama has no reason to boast — far from that. Of course, after two weeks of a government shutdown organized by the powerhouses of the Republican Party and the world held in suspense, the United States Congress came to an agreement by adopting a plan to raise the American debt ceiling and allow the Democratic administration to continue public spending.

Certainly, the president’s steadfastness paid off and 87 Republican representatives came to their senses by voting for the bill, deeply fracturing the Republican Party. But the adopted law calls for government funding until Feb. 7, 2014, the Democrats having not succeeded in pushing the deadline further back; a commission to propose more long-term budgetary solutions is picking up, thus simply postponing the power struggle … for a little while, at least. At the economic level, Standard & Poor’s estimates the cost of this disastrous episode to be $24 billion, not counting the loss of income, estimated at a loss of at least 0.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2013. Never will political irresponsibility have worked so much against economic recovery. Obama saved the jobs of 800,000 federal workers (of which 1,265 out of 1,701 assigned to the White House were forced to stay home without pay).

One can say that by resorting to a shutdown, the American president is much better off than the last time he ended up negotiating with Republicans regarding the debt ceiling in the summer of 2011. But his opponents’ defeat masks an especially troubling development for the United States as the least democratic legislative plan is henceforth in the line of focus.

The root of the political crisis is none other than the sheer will of the GOP right (Grand Old Party, nickname of the Republican Party) to systematically counter any development for the state. To be honest, the GOP is seriously insane. Since Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009, a populist outbreak, very rooted in American traditions, hasn’t ceased to perturb the Republican engine. In full swing is the tea party, a polymorphous movement involved neither with the neoconservatives from the Bush years, nor with the ultra-nostalgic liberals from the Reagan era, and which counts about 50 elected members in the House of Representatives (out of 232 Republicans).

Within the GOP, the main preoccupation is to make the black president screw up — or rather, to make him the standard-bearer of the America that must be brought down, one that, since the Roosevelt era, means giving a real role to the state. They particularly seek to put an end to the Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as Obamacare), a significant reform from Obama’s fundamental mandate, which establishes health insurance for disadvantaged workers. It’s by determining the increase in public spending from Obamacare that they chose to block public finances. And they promise to keep fighting. Behind this extremism, one finds some variants such as the rejection of any tax increase, the restriction of federal authority, disregard for the elite and alarming isolationism.

From now on, these elements comprise part of the daily political language in the United States and, even if they match neither the views nor the interests of classic Republicans (used to innumerable compromises with the Democrats), they impose themselves on them like weighty tactical intimidation. For his part, the ex-reformer president is going to see this throughout his presidency and is going to have to face up to the bad boys in unremitting combat that he risks being consumed by; the emergence of an extreme right that never stops (not even for the international discrediting of the United States) is an indirect effect of his trademark hesitancy. The paradox rules that, in order to modernize America in the way that it aspires to be modernized, Obama would have to also transform the rival party. One rarely has the enemies that one deserves.