Twelve months in, Obama’s still standing

Kelly McParland

I happened to spend a few days in the US recently, and Murphy’s case appears to reflect domestic opinion. The President’s ratings are way down. The disappointment is palpable. If you pay attention to local TV, which I wouldn’t recommend unless your appetite for screaming ninnies is insatiable, Obama has been one big letdown from the word Go.

The reasons are similar to those offered by Murphy, Obama hasn’t measured up. His rhetoric is wearing thin, in fact there are already patches where it’s worn right through. He hasn’t changed Washington the way he promised. He hasn’t carried through on some of his better known promises, Guantanamo is still up and operating, and gay rights have gone nowhere but backward.

Being cool. which was so cool when he was campaigning, isn’t such a big attraction after a year in office, when a little heat directed in a few well-chosen directions wouldn’t go unappreciated.

Accustomed to Obama

All of which is true. Obama’s ability to inspire Americans has certainly waned. Murphy suggests Americans have become accustomed to Obama’s speech patterns and now recognize the ‘trick of rhythm and cadence’ he uses to conjure up eloquence on demand. Which is probably the case, though it may also be the result of overexposure and Obama’s tendency to unsheath his oratory far too often, reflecting on local canine regulations with the same grandiloquent tones he uses when discussing deaths in Afghanistan.

Americans saw far too much of him in the early months of his presidency, when he was a whirling dervish out to solve every issue, big and small, confronting the country.

Nonetheless, writing off Obama at this point seems a bit premature, and as much the result of unrealistic expectations as his failure to deliver. It’s always easier to like someone else’s leaders, but from a distance it’s hard to fathom how anyone could seriously have expected the new president to deliver on each and every one of his overambitious goals in the first 12 months.

Change the culture of Washington? Save me. You could as easily alter the DNA of cats. The peculiar mix of greed, power and politics that makes up the hyper-intensive horse-trading atmosphere in the US capital has had more than two centuries to age and marinate. It wasn’t going to change because a slick new junior senator from Illinois came along, even with immense public backing, and suggested it’s time to try something else.

The 435 congressional representatives and 100 sentors are 535 individual agents, aligned with a party more out of convenience than anything else, devoted to one thing and one thing only, their own re-election. So Obama was supposed to herd Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and all their squabbling colleagues into a big room and convince them to stop being so goddam self-centred? Good luck. And then he could phone up Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and sweet-talk him into running for Governor of Alaska.

Put the expectations to one side for a moment, and what has Obama achieved? He’s within an ace of getting a national healthcare program finally put in place. He managed to halt the death spiral of the US economy (which a year ago had many now-cocky critics rending their garments and pleading for salvation from a merciful God) just before impact.

Primary attention

He’s overseen a departure, not a retreat, from Iraq and refocussing on Afghanistan, where primary attention should always have been.

None of it is wrapped neatly in a bow by any means. Americans, especially those who already have healthcare, are far from convinced they needed the overhaul that has been so messily accomplished. The system now contemplated is a vast stew of compromises and competing interests.

It will be astonishingly expensive and there is no guarantee whatsoever that it will be an improvement over anything but no healthcare at all. But a century’s worth of presidents have tried to make it happen, and Obama is the one who succeeded. You have to be pretty blind to the vast resourcefulness of the US not to bet they’ll eventually make it work.

The US economy still stinks. The Obama team’s approach was to haul out enormous quantities of borrowed money and use it to smother the flames, ending the immediate danger while putting off the frightening implications for later. But it worked, and at a time when the economic cluelessness of the previous administration had much of the world bug-eyed with alarm, because if the US economy crashed, everyone else was going to go down with it.

There is a huge mess of debt and taxes still to be addressed, but at least we’re still around to address it, and conservatives nostalgic for the magic days when Ronald Reagan bestrode the land should remember his miracle cure for the economy involved interest rates at 20 percent and a recession every bit as harrowing as the one we just endured. You want a housing collapse? Try mortgage rates at 20 percent.

Bush-style

And there’s Afghanistan. It took Obama forever to make up his mind on the next stage, which is being treated as a bad thing. Better to bark out a command Bush-style, or worse, Rumsfeld-style. He’s dealing with the lives of tens of thousands of troops and hundreds of thousands of Afghans, so he decides he wants to think about it, and consult someone besides his own cabinet. Big deal.

Plus, not to put too fine a point on it, a president has to have priorities if he’s to succeed at all, and healthcare was Priority No 1. Trying to referee two congressional firefights at once, Afghanistan and healthcare, would have doomed both. So he took his time until healthcare had a chance to gel. Makes sense to me.

It strikes me as not bad a record for 12 months’ work. There’s little he can do about gay rights when the states, which have jurisdiction, keep voting down reforms. No, he hasn’t imposed some scatter-brained greenhouse gas emissions plan on the country, and good for him.

The big Copenhagen conference made clear just what a rat’s nest of competing interests that continues to be. Guantanamo isn’t closed, but that’s because only a limited constituency really wants it to be; the rest are still scared silly over what might happen if those folks ever got loose, and don’t see the big gains to be had from shifting them to Illinois.

The guy’s got limits, that’s pretty clear. But the US today, compared to where it was a year ago, looks far better off than any realistic forecast could have predicted.

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