[Global & Mail, Canada]

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Excelsior, Mexico

President Barack Obama: U.S. Destabilizer-in-Chief

"The prospects of the Republican Party wrestling the presidency from the hands of Obama seem dismal. The Obama factor has provoked perhaps the greatest internal polarization and division ever for Republicans. … The imbalance that has befallen the Republican Party and its likely defeat in 2012 is the doing of Obama the destabilizer … and may be a prelude to the continuation and perhaps intensification of a transformative process that the U.S. had postponed for decades."

By José Luis Valdés Ugalde*

Translated By Halszka Czarnocka

February 9, 2012

Mexico - Excelsior - Original Article (Spanish)

From the moment he delivered that memorable piece of oratory as guest of honor at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that chose John Kerry for president, Barack Obama became the most effective destabilizing force on the U.S. public scene. Let me explain myself: his election to the White House, which according to Lyndon B. Johnson was never to be occupied by anyone but a member of the White Anglo Saxon Protestant community, was itself an anomaly that destabilized the political environment for the better and exasperated spirits that had been placidly enjoying the sleep of the self-righteous.

Obama's election alone served as a call to arms for the ultra-right, forcing out elements from the farthest depths of the U.S. psyche, producing an atmosphere at once fascinating and menacing. Obama's victory allowed the United States to move toward the end of racial thinking, and at last, placed issues of great significance and argumentative weight on the table before the more-or-less traditional members of the political establishment.

From the lethargic presidential confines of the born-again, guilt-laden George W. Bush, we passed to a freshness of discourse and elegance of oratory (and, as we have seen, even singing!) of a man who, by Washington standards, is a rather unconventional politician. Obama, a mixed-race activist from Chicago and, after all, a politician of color within the context of U.S. multiculturalism, has himself become the most important political event of our times. His presidency is a continental divide between the old and new United States. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell referred to him, expressing his support, as "a transformational figure.” Apart from the significance that the support of such a senior Republican had for Obama, Powell's formulation gave his political profile a distinction that does him justice.

Obama has managed to transform himself and his narrative from the first day of his presidency, which may result in a synergy that has hardly been achieved since the days of the Kennedies (it was Robert Kennedy, by the way, who told us in 1961 that "In the next 40 years a Negro can achieve the same position that my brother has.”) But at the same time and perhaps even more importantly, without intending to, when his emergence brought forth racist feelings and beliefs that most dare not speak in plain language, Obama became the agitator of good conscience within the WASP community. Whipped up by the Tea Party, far right Republicans and even more moderate factions have chosen to subsume their racial bias against Obama, instead accusing him of being a "socialist," "not a Christian,” "un-American” and other epithets that only serve to disguise a frustration and a banality that, during the last campaign season, only a Sarah Palin could so purely embody. What Obama personifies, at the highest level of the government, is the quintessential modernizer, simply trying to reconcile capitalism with democracy, and elevating the level of efficiency, distributive capacity and standards on U.S. markets while improving the competence of its political system. The instant celebrity of Palin, on the other hand, marks perhaps the moment in which the decline and fall of U.S. power became inevitable.

[International Herald Tribune, France]

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