Fewer than one year from the mid-term elections, the American president
finds himself at a decisive period in his term
President
Obama: Has he triangulated himself beyond all recognition?
Le Figaro, France
Obama's Language Doesn't Match His True Convictions
"Despite all the resources of his great intelligence, it is this timidity that leads him into the complexity of technical processes, without giving the country the language it yearns for."
After being in office for a
year, Obama has begun the decisive battle of his presidency. The upcoming electoral
calendar is decisive indeed: in November 2010, the mid-term elections will
decide if he's in a position to maintain a Democratic majority, undoubtedly
smaller than the current one; or, as was the case with Clinton in 1994, if it
will fall into the clutches of a Republican opposition majority that will result
in a kind of “American cohabitation.” If so, nothing indicates that the 2012 election
will be favorable to him.
The humiliating Massachusetts
senatorial election defeat can be seen as a blessing in disguise, triggering an
alarm in time to rectify the president's strategic course and public
communications. What errors, then, has Obama committed?
On the one hand, in fact, the
president has remained faithful to his promise to govern from the center: in fiscal
matters, he demands only a return to the tax standards of the Reagan era; in
matters of economic management, we have seen him mount a frontal assault on
Wall Street. Whereas in the fever of the fall of 2008, Bush nationalized, Obama
hasn't tried to transform these state commitments into as many levers of a proactive
industrial policy. And of the diagnosis of moderate Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, that
Obama was penalized for having strained the ties between his centrist allies and
a progressive left to which he belongs - these are ties upon which depends the
very existence of the Democratic Party! This widely-shared diagnosis, however, doesn't
correspond to the true substance of the policies hitherto followed by Obama. And
yet, a diagnosis that only concerns the totality of measures undertaken doesn't
take into account the symbolic dimension of public action which may be crucial
in the conduct of a people's affairs. And it is here that Obama has flinched.
A
HAUGHTY INDIFFERENCE
For example, let us consider a
question: relations with the European allies (and even Japanese). Although Obama
has taken no hostile action against his NATO allies and, without doubt, the
prudent return of American diplomacy to multilateralism has reassured most
governments of the Old Continent, the Obama method also consists of humiliating,
consciously or not and one after the other, all European governments, which has
lost him all goodwill on this side of the Atlantic.
Thus there
emerges in the person of the president an image of haughty indifference, to which
the entire northern hemisphere of the planet has been favored. At work in
domestic politics, one finds the same incapacity to boost public opinion. Obama
was right to make full use of his majority in Congress to pursue the most
consensual health care legislation possible. And despite an arduous road, it
was almost accomplished with the Senate vote late in December 2009. But at no time
did the president solemnly address the nation to explain the stakes of such a
reform which, in effect, would have put a major financial burden on a segment
of the middle class already covered by insurance, to the benefit of a precarious
group of people who have been left to their own devices and who are mostly
unemployed youth and untrained workers. And clearly, the overwhelming majority is
Black and Hispanic. His lack of candor has demobilized the potentially generous
impulses of the majority and facilitated a right-wing offensive that took advantage
of this to deceive the public and flatter its worst prejudices by drowning it in
incomprehensible technocratic detail.
A
VERY RELATIVE FAILURE
Obama has responded by
opening with regulation of the financial system, which is a much-needed second
front. There again, behind the predictable firmness of his discourse, one can
glimpse, with the placement of rather conservative FED veteran Paul Volcker on
the front lines, the wish to have the stalest part of the center assume the
claims of the most left-wing segment of public opinion. But as always, the
president, because he starts with his own ideas, which are frankly too leftist
and as a result remain unpresentable to public opinion in their current form, is
reluctant to show his ideological energy on questions where he could and should
be followed.
Posted by WORLDMEETS.US
Despite all the
resources of his great intelligence, it is this timidity that leads him into
the complexity of technical processes, without giving the country the language it
yearns for. This nonetheless very relative failure of Obama, who still enjoys 57
percent favorable public approval, like Reagan one year into his term, consists,
then, of having conducted a centrist policy, of which he is a bit ashamed, with
language that is a bit too leftist. Yet if the president had with conviction, maintained
the same mobilizing language and placed himself at the center, he could have paradoxically
conducted a policy much more to the left and more in keeping with some of his
deepest intuitions. But here, to recall Pierre Mendès
of France, to govern is first of all to choose.
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