Slow Burner


Written by Chris Cork • Special Features • January 2010

President Barack Obama is emerging as a thoughtful man who does not shoot from the hip. Almost a year into the Obama Presidency there is beginning to be a shape to the vision of the world that he had before entering the White House, and it is perhaps not quite as he hoped it would be. Rarely has an incoming US President been weighted down with as much hope and aspiration as Obama. His brilliance as an orator caught the hearts and votes of many - but increased the polarity that lies at the heart of most politics and never more so than today, with America a deeply divided nation. Despite the differences there was a genuine sense of hope, and a feeling that there really would be ‘change' as he made his inaugural speech. He looked good in the polls, seemed to be pressing the right buttons on the international stage and the media were prepared to allow him a respectable honeymoon period before letting loose the attack dogs. That was then and this is now, with two wars around his neck, Guantanamo projected to shift to Illinois but not yet done so and a Nobel prize that in retrospect he would have done better to quietly but firmly reject - President Obama no longer shines as bright as he once did.

The campaign trail is a different beast to the Presidency. You can promise what you like - within reason - whilst out on the stump, but in the Oval Office you have to deliver. The media are now rather less concerned with whether or not Michelle Obama's sleeveless dresses are right and proper, and rather more concerned about the US economy, unemployment, war and the price of oil. Obama's poll ratings have slipped significantly, mid-term elections are around the corner and one suspects that he is already eyeing that most important of futures - his legacy. Standing back from the media circus which would seem to have already written him off in some sectors as a ‘ditherer', we may see a different picture of the man and what he has done thus far - and he can be seen as a man who has achieved considerably more than he is being credited with.

Consider firstly the passage of the health care reform bill that he has fought for since his first day in office. If the reforms are passed by 20th January, his first anniversary, he will have achieved more in a shorter time to reform health care in the US than any other President. The Democrats have been trying to pass legislation to reform health care for 60 years - and failed until now. Truman, Johnson, Carter and Clinton all failed - but barring an unlikely last-minute hitch, Obama is going to succeed. The Bill he will sign undoubtedly has its flaws - poor on consumer choice and cost controls to name but two - yet in terms of the problem it sets out to address it is probably best to sign up to an imperfect change agent and improve it as time goes by than tinker on the margins with what was already in place. This is truly transformational legislation that will touch the lives of every American, rich and poor, and probably the biggest change in the way in which government intervenes in the life of the individual since the New Deal.

Now take the case of the $787 billion economic stimulus package that he signed in only in his second month in office. There is already evidence that this timely move is heading off another depression, and ameliorating the ravages that the world's bankers inflicted upon all of us. Mainstream economists consider that Obama's action prevented a deeper dip in the economy and restored economic growth in the third quarter and that, without it, GDP would still be negative and unemployment over 11%. Unemployment is currently 9.4%, not allowing for seasonal adjustment and looks set to continue to fall - but slowly. And we are still in the first year - not so bad so far.

Foreign policy as in Uncle Sam's dealings with the rest of the world was, by the end of the Bush era, in a shambles. The Neocons had dragged America into unilateralism and a faith-based and moralistic militarism that fractured old friendships and crucially deeply wounded its relations with the Muslim world. (The exception being Saudi Arabia, with which America has always had a ‘blind-eye' relationship based on its dependence on Saudi oil.) The Neocons are being turned by Obama into a toxic footnote and his early charm-offensive has begun to pay off. He has reoriented America's relations with Russia, Iran, China, Iraq, Israel - and is trying to make the best of a bad job by repairing relations with the Muslim world, in particular Afghanistan and Pakistan which are the two principal foreign policy preoccupations of the Obama presidency.

Here he is less sure-footed. Re-making the relationship with Pakistan and Afghanistan - one country a narco-state run by a President who controls little beyond his own back garden; the other a state perennially teetering on the edge of failure, was never going to be easy. Conflating the two in the ‘Af/Pak' package now looks like a mistake, and we are beginning to see a re-work. Richard Holbrook is less to the fore and seen as perhaps having backed the wrong horse with President Zardari of Pakistan who has lost popular support; and Holbrooke's relationship with President Karazai has deteriorated to the point at which they both ended up shouting at one another the last time they met. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, untried in the foreign policy role and following the clinically steely Condoleezza Rice, has brought a new warmth and subtlety to the role. Both the Kerry-Lugar Bill and the new Afghan strategy announced recently have received a mixed press at best, both at home and abroad for President Obama. It remains to be seen whether America can extricate itself with honor from the Afghan morass and whether Pakistanis are ever going to forgive and forget.

Obama was nominated for the Nobel Peace Price less than two months into office, and we must question the wisdom of both the committee making the selection and of Obama for accepting it. The world would have thought better of him for making a dignified refusal than an apologetic acceptance. It may turn out to be the most significant misjudgment of his entire Presidency, because he will be forever defined as the prizewinner who never merited the award. He has failed to deliver on his promise of closing Guantanamo within the year and we have yet to hear the words ‘Millennium Development Goals' pass his lips.

Despite the easy-to-point-to failures, President Obama is not as much a ditherer as he is painted. He is emerging as a thoughtful man, not given to knee-jerk reactions. For America this is a step-change from the shoot-from-the-hip style of his predecessor that for many is uncomfortable. America is wary of presidents who appear to be intellectual - and none would doubt that this is what Obama is. The world has had eight years of Bush-ism, and less than twelve months of the ‘Obama approach'. Bush was a disaster in terms of foreign policy, Obama is not - yet; and his slow-burn presidency is infinitely preferable to what went before.