Obama’s Destruction

What happens when supporters of the defeated parties begin to challenge and discredit on all sides someone who is democratically elected to the highest office, denying him the ability, competence and even the right to make decisions for which he is responsible?

None other than Barack Obama, assumed to be the most powerful man in the world, is in his seventh year of such a situation. According to the Constitution, he has the executive authority to appoint Cabinet members at his sole discretion — although every appointee must be “confirmed” by Congress — and independently conduct foreign and domestic policy — although laws must once again be voted on by both houses of Congress.

The American political system has for a long time (since 1787) been based on the separation, mutual control and balance of executive, legislative and judicial powers, with the proviso that the president is the “most personal” institution. Therefore, it is impossible to separate the man from the office. When one is curtailed, the damage to the other is visible.

Furthermore, Barack Obama, to use a phrase familiar to us, has been “torn down” practically from day one since he took office on Jan. 20, 2009, despite the fact that after winning in 2008, he defeated other challengers and won another term four years later.

As the victor, Obama is the president even of those Americans who didn’t vote for him. That other half, or at least a significant part of it, by all accounts couldn’t reconcile themselves to the results of the election for reasons that are not only political, but also racist.

Even Obama’s birth certificate has been challenged. To this day there are quite a number of people who are persuaded that he was born in Africa, and for a fair number of citizens, the fact that his middle name is Hussein is definitive proof that he is a Muslim.

These conspiracy theories aside, political conflicts remain which are becoming more aggressive as he nears the end of his stay in the White House.

The most drastic in this respect is the recent letter sent by 47 Republican senators to the leadership of Iran stating that Obama doesn’t have the authority to make an agreement with that country about halting its nuclear program. The New York Times took the occasion to invite readers in an editorial to think what would happen if 47 Democratic senators sent a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 telling him that Ronald Reagan didn’t have the right to negotiate with him on nuclear disarmament.

Arizona has an even more drastic campaign against Obama, in which the state assembly is considering a law that would give the state the right to ignore all “unconstitutional” laws made by the president, which brings to mind a similar rebellion of slaveholding states before the start of the Civil War.

Nor has an internal Republican newsletter been forgotten which called for “armed revolution” if Obama won the 2012 election.

The intensity with which Obama’s law on “nearly universal” health care—which looking at from the outside appears to be his most progressive move as president—is being undermined is unprecedented. Because of this reform , the president has been called a communist and Photoshopped with a Hitler mustache.

Because the majority of the opposition wanted to harm Obama, Congress has twice blocked the Obama administration by refusing to vote to raise the debt ceiling, which at one point reduced the United States’ credit rating. He has also set records in terms of the number of threats to his security.

How did Obama react to this, one might say, systematic destruction, in which no small part was played by millions of dollars from right-wing American tycoons?

He reacted like a politician who is convinced that what he is doing is right, and it is the right, and even the duty, of the opposition to resist.

Especially so since the government took on probably the most difficult circumstances in postwar American history: The height of an economic and financial crisis, which honestly began in America, and from which the country emerged under Obama’s leadership, and two inherited wars, Afghanistan and Iraq, which he brought to an end.

What this has “torn down” has not been made a political issue, nor have his fellow party members leapt to his defense, because, among other reasons, political sycophancy doesn’t look good in the eyes of the voters.

His public support has alternately fallen and risen, but in America ratings aren’t a political argument. The rules state that a bad and unpopular president, if he hasn’t violated the Constitution, remains in office until the end of his term. This can be overturned if he resigns for some reason or he is recalled for violating the Constitution. In such a case, the vice president will complete his mandate.

Obama could certainly have done better, but it could be argued that he only changed what was possible in the current political context.

Only history will render the final verdict on his success — or lack thereof. Meanwhile, the only one who can destroy Obama politically is … Obama himself.