'BLAIR AND
OBAMA'
[The
Telegraph, U.K.]
Le Figaro, France
Obama: Between Intuition and Genius
"A great political figure, Obama has above all an intuition for inevitable change. It is to this intuition that he submits himself and then builds a kind of optimization of the inevitable, which then leads in the direction of his fundamental convictions."
Chronicle of Alexandre
Adler
Translated By L. McKenzie Zeiss
January 17, 2009
France
- Le Figaro - Original Article (French)
How sweet it is, for someone like me who has the difficult job
of foretelling the immediate future, to finally have the power to predict a major
occurrence already scheduled for months: the investiture of Barack Obama. It is
without doubt a huge event. This will be the inauguration of the first Black
president of the United States, and the second president - after Abraham
Lincoln - from the industrial state of Illinois [Reagan was born there, but was
elected after being governor of California]. Obama will also be the second
president - after Franklin Roosevelt this time - to take up his mandate in the
heart of an economic depression the magnitude of which indicates an inevitable “paradigm
shift,” or to put it more simply, a great transformation of an economic and
social structure that has reached its historical limits.
All of this is well explained in the collective anthology,
published by Editions Odile Jacob, entitled simply Change We Can Believe In [Le
changement: Nous pouvons y croire]. Signed only by Barack Obama, though clearly written with the help of many
others, the book retraces the entire 2008 campaign through the
president-elect's principal speeches. The book also contains a more detailed, step-by-step
elaboration (the result of a collective effort), in which one can clearly discern
the civilizing ambition of the 44th president. A great political figure, Obama
has above all an intuition for inevitable change. It is to this intuition that
he submits himself and then builds a kind of optimization of the inevitable,
which then leads in the direction of his fundamental convictions.
Obama’s intuition serves him well in this situation of
irreversible global crisis, the matrix of which was adopted long ago by America's
ruling class - that is to say, with the advent of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Reagan
also arrived at the heart of a great crisis, albeit a geopolitical one. The
Reagan program consisted of forming a purely political exterior coalition that
included Europe, China and Japan. At the same time, he adopted a domestic
policy of dismantling the fundamental structures of a declining Democratic
Party. In exchange, the end of trade unionism was effectively compensated by
full employment in the service sector, jobs that paid mediocre wages and the
promise of property ownership for all.
[The
Times, U.K.]
Today, all the elements issuing from this matrix have broken
down: a huge technologically-advanced military that lacks the knowhow to
successfully conclude a revolutionary war on a battlefield where infantry,
intelligence, and the capacity to rebuild a society have replaced high
technology, nuclear weaponry and even aircraft carriers; the aggressiveness of
Islamism - more diffuse than that of Sovietism, has not been defeated; and the
growth of service sector jobs now blocked by both inequality of
income distribution and increasing competition from developing countries. As
for access to property, this has simply given birth to the subprime mortgage
problem.
Posted by WORLDMEETS.US
The defeat of the Clintonistas in a campaign that they oddly
seemed to have taken for granted, rested on two strategic errors committed at
opposite ends of the chain: On one end, Hillary Clinton played the same cards
as [Socialist Party leader] Martine Aubry in France 
,
appealing to the left to unify trade unions and corporations in settling on a
list of demands. On the other end was a subliminal message that flowed quite
naturally out of eight years under Clinton: that the Democrats wouldn't change
the existing model very much, but would lead toward a kind of “Reaganism with a
human face.”
The genius of Barack Obama was to be the first to register in
his candidacy a dual refusal in regard to relations between unions and corporations and the extension of
the Reagan model. For as vague as this ambition might appear, it nevertheless encapsulated
a reality that had been increasingly felt in the lead up to the final explosion
of September 15, 2008 [the day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy] and the desire
of the middle classes, in a world of high technology, for the birth of a
program founded more on ethics than on demands, and on the transformation of
values rather than on a redistribution that is immediate and carefree.
It is this original [Reagan] program which has in large part
resulted in making an African-American, formed both by Harvard and by social activism
on the South Side of Chicago, the incarnation of a new paradigm in which Blacks
are no longer organized like a communitarian body, but on the contrary, as an
efficient vehicle for a new politics that encompasses everyone. The capacity of
the new president to successively vanquish the two best and most popular
opposing candidates, one from the old Democratic Party and the other from the
Republican Party, certainly proves his political genius, which will be
reinforced by his very judicious selection of his governing team.
The task now is not only to manage the transition to action,
but also the weaker elements of his program:
a creeping protectionism and a mistrust of the armed forces - faults
that are based on an underestimation of the present hazards.
CLICK HERE FOR FRENCH
VERSION
[Posted by WORLDMEETS.US January 18, 8:45pm]
