Everyone had a good chortle at Barack Obama when he was forced to repeat his famous campaign slogan \u201cYes we can\u201d with the addition of a long pause , followed by the word \u201cbut\u201d. \u00a0The laughter came from the usual cynics \u2013 people who are ever adept at passing judgement but who never take the risk of doing anything more difficult than turning a waspish phrase. But it also came from na\u00efve idealists \u2013 who see politics as a kind of fairytale or parable but who have no real understanding of the complexities the political art involves.<\/p>\n
Obama\u2019s accommodation with political reality reminded me of another seminal moment. Sitting in his kitchen in Wales, after it was announced he was to become Archbishop of Canterbury but while he was still the comparatively obscure Bishop Of Monmouth, Rowan Williams said, in a moment of terrifying illumination: \u201cPeople are going to be very disappointed in me.\u201d Of course they wouldn\u2019t, I told him. \u201cThey will it\u2019s inevitable,\u201d he insisted. What Rowan had suddenly glimpsed, and Barack Obama has gradually learned, was the terrible burden of conflicting expectations.<\/p>\n
As he approaches the midterm congressional elections on Tuesday it\u2019s easy to make a list of all the things the American president has not got right in the past two years.\u00a0 He has not kept his promise to close down the Guant\u00e1namo detention centre, hasn\u2019t quelled the rising voices of critics at home, has echoed George Bush\u2019s bellicosity on Iran and has been crassly nationalist with BP whilst refusing to shut down offshore oil exploration. He\u2019s allowed himself to be pushed around by the Israelis as they refuse to stop building settlements on Palestinian land. He has not introduced a carbon tax or reversed the Bush tax cuts for the rich.<\/p>\n
Yet there is a lot to set against that. His massive $787bn fiscal stimulus has been crucial in averting global depression. He\u2019s prevented trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities unravelling worldwide which would have meant even more people losing their homes. He has kept millions in work by bailing out the US car industry. He is one of the few world leaders not to be panicked by the latest voodoo economics into rushing prematurely into austerity \u2013 a policy which one wag in America described as the economic equivalent of creationism. Instead he\u2019s embracing a \u201cgrowth now\u201d strategy.<\/p>\n
His healthcare reform, for all its flaws, has achieved something which has eluded Republicans and Democrats for decades. He has transformed US attitudes to the Muslim world, improved relations with Russia and introduced a humbler more consensual approach to international relations. He has negotiated an exit of sorts from Iraq. He has appointed the first Hispanic Supreme Court judge and an unprecedented three women to sit on the top court\u2019s nine-member bench. He has bravely spoken out against the state of Arizona\u2019s controversial new immigration law<\/p>\n
To rework the words of Abraham Lincoln, he has learned that you can please almost all the people some of the time, some of the people all the time, but you can\u2019t please all the people all the time. Things which sound easy enough on the election campaign look trickier from the other side of the Oval Office desk.<\/p>\n
One of my own formative political experiences came quite late in life. After decades of reporting from Africa, and shouting at politicians back home about what needed to be done, I took a break from journalism in 2004\/5 to work for the Commission for Africa set up by Tony Blair.\u00a0 During and after it I worked with Bob Geldof and Bono lobbying the world\u2019s most powerful leaders in the run up to the Gleneagles summit.<\/p>\n
At one point a senior European politician came up to me and asked me to stop passing notes to Geldof prompting him to attack the Common Agricultural Policy. \u00a0\u201cWhatever you think about it, that\u2019s not going to be addressed through this forum,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you carry on people will think you\u2019re not serious about achieving what change is feasible.\u201d Politics, you swiftly learn from the inside, is indeed the art of the possible and compromise is at its heart. Only half of what Gleneagles promised was ever fulfilled, yet it delivered 2,000 times more to children in Africa than Live Aid did.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not hard to imagine the kind of compromises which have been presented to Obama. He will swiftly have been shown the security dossiers on those detained in Guant\u00e1namo and asked whether he was prepared to take responsibility for what havoc they might wreak if they were released. He made the wrong call, but he was prey to the classic Democrat\u2019s fear of being seen to be weak on national security. That\u2019s why he is sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan in an unwinnable war. It\u2019s why he has stepped up drone strikes in Pakistan to record levels, and plans to treble George Bush\u2019s plans for weapons sales to the Saudis. The burden of conflicting expectations.<\/p>\n
It explains why a man who has made such significant steps on international nuclear disarmament with Russia \u2013 so much so that he was, early on, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize \u2013 has also promised $80bn to modernise the US nuclear deterrent.<\/p>\n
It accounts too for the ambiguity in his attitude to the reform of Wall Street. The measures he is introducing are far-reaching. He has created new regulations for the hedge funds, private equity funds and, above all, the derivatives which added the opacity and leverage to the financial system which brought the great crash. There are tougher rules on consumer products, limits on betting the market using other people\u2019s money and requirements for banks to disclose potential conflicts of interest to customers. There will be powers for regulators to seize control of bodies like Lehman Brothers and AIG whose implosions were milestones in the meltdown.<\/p>\n
All that is good. But under pressure from corporate America \u2013 which accused him of being anti-business, stifling innovation and crushing confidence \u2013 the president removed some of his more radical proposals. It will only become clear whether his reforms have tackled the issue of some banks being \u201ctoo big to fail\u201d when the next crisis arrives. And he has not forced financial institutions to hold more capital and liquidity to make collapses less likely in the first place \u2013 an issue he has left to the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. Even so he has put in place the greatest tightening of financial rules since the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 which was repealed in 1999 to bring in the era of deregulation which led to the current crisis.<\/p>\n
Barack Obama has been caught between America\u2019s proverbial rock and hard place on that and so many issues. This week\u2019s elections will doubtless make his room for manoeuvre even tighter. But under Obama \u2013 a man who takes the long-term view \u2013 the US has reclaimed much of its moral authority. With the Republicans in such disarray under pressure from the populist fanatics of the Tea Party movement, Barack Obama looks a lot better than the alternatives. \u201cYes, we can,\u201d he modulated the other day, \u201cbut it is not going to happen overnight\u201d.\u00a0 Only a fool would have supposed that it could.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Everyone had a good chortle at Barack Obama when he was forced to repeat his famous campaign slogan \u201cYes we can\u201d with the addition of a long pause , followed by the word \u201cbut\u201d. \u00a0The laughter came from the usual cynics \u2013 people who are ever adept at passing judgement but who never take the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[252],"class_list":["post-2842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2842"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7546,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2842\/revisions\/7546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}