"As
the saying goes, you shouldn't bite off more than you can chew. And in Obama's case,
the president decided all at once to end the economic crisis (hasn't happened
yet), fight the lords of Wall Street (who are winning the game), defeat the
Taliban (a task that the great powers have failed to achieve), punish British
Petroleum and pass a health care reform law, which sapped his popularity only
halfway through his term."
During his campaign to be the
Democratic nominee for the U.S. presidency, Barack Obama was criticized, ironically,
for one of his chief virtues: his oratory. The Illinois senator’s gift for
words became one of his weaknesses. It was said that behind the candidate's distinguished
figure, behind his beautiful words, elegant phrases and
unhesitant voice, there was no substance. He was accused of being a loudspeaker
that repeated with a statesman’s tone and in a modulated and convincing voice what
everyone wanted - what the country and the world needed: move away from the nightmare
of George W. Bush, his obsession with weapons of mass destruction and his oil
wars to try a new rhetoric of peace and security. It was essential to mitigate
the effects of the worst-ever global economic crisis.
Obama promised to end the war
in Iraq. And although he did it more than a year after taking office, he
kept his promise. But before leaving Iraq, true to his belief that the real
danger to the United States resides in Afghanistan and the rugged mountains of
Tora Bora (cave of Osama bin Laden), Obama fully immersed himself in another
armed conflict initiated by Bush. Afghanistan would then become Barack Obama’s
war: he with his splendid but implausible Nobel Peace Prize!
In the middle of the worst
recession since 1929, overwhelmed by the collapse of the housing market and with
a cascade of bankruptcies by banks and financial institutions, Obama declared
war on Wall Street, the market that had triggered the monumental fraud of
subprime mortgages; “garbage mortgages” that were so easily granted and
destined to fall hopelessly overdue, after being sold in bulk on all stock
markets.
Obama launched an attack on
the bankers and returned to his heroic speeches, but these fell on deaf ears, since
the bankers, rescued with huge sums of taxpayer money, soon returned to their
corrupt practice of dividing up billions of dollars in bonuses. So began the
slur on the figure of the first African-American president, whose oratory was
unable to convince greedy British Petroleum to immediately repair the ecological
damage it caused in the Gulf of Mexico.
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
Nevertheless, as Obama
struggled with the economic crisis, against the banks and the generals who were
reluctant to abandon Iraq, the recalcitrant Right had, from his first day in
office, mounted a battle to the death to prevent his reelection. Bill O’Reilly,
advisor to Felipe Calderon Dick Morris, Bush's chief strategist Karl Rove, and
Sarah Palin, now a political commentator (all oracles of Fox News), decided
that Obama would be a one-term president. We will see the results of that war with
the legislative elections on November 2. (All forecasts suggest that many Democratic
candidates will be defeated).
As the saying goes, you
shouldn't bite off more than you can chew. And in Obama's case, the president decided
all at once to end the economic crisis (hasn't happened yet), fight the lords of
Wall Street (who are winning the game), defeat the Taliban (a task that the great
powers have failed to achieve), punish British Petroleum and pass a health care
reform law, which sapped his popularity only halfway through his term. As a
consequence, the man that seemed so invincible on the day of his election is
now struggling to win the midterm elections. He needs a win to carry out his
program and lend credibility to his government in in order to launch his re-election
bid in 2011.
It's true that in many ways,
the Right has helped undermine Obama’s popularity. But none more than those who
began to imply sotto voce
that the United States wasn't ready for an African-American leader. Others
started to repeat a hackneyed argument that did considerably damage to him during
his campaign: the thesis is that his successful experience as a community
leader in the slums of Chicago failed to prepare him for assuming the U.S. presidency.
That argument is particularly compelling now that U.S. supremacy is being
challenged by the emergence of China and the Asian powers. All predictions say
sustained economic growth over the next ten years will be in Asia.
“Yes we can” (sí se puede) was the refrain
that Obama persistently repeated in every speech and that eventually led him to
the White House. But since campaigning and governing are two different things, the
man who now governs a divided country, beset by economic problems, with a war [in
Afghanistan] as unpopular as the Iraq War and another with the Right, he is instead
struggling to preserve his Democratic electoral base. He doesn't want to be a one-term
president like Jimmy Carter, who became a global statesman after his failure in
the White House. And he's too young to retire to a private life.
