Time for the big one or: Quo Vadis, America?

MacGuffin

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Time for the big topic of this fall (and perhaps for some time)

Dreams of 2008
Obama's Lost Magic

By Klaus Brinkb?umer

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Two years on from his historic election victory, US President Barack Obama is trying to recover his lost magic as defeat for the Democrats looms in the midterm elections. But he is no longer the man he used to be, and his window of opportunity has passed.

He wants everything to be as it was before. He wants it to be as innocent and passionate, as honest and boundless. He wants it to be as full of promises and the conviction that everything is possible in the Land of Opportunity. Because, as he told his supporters back then, "We are the ones we've been waiting for." It was a rallying cry so powerful and romantic it sounded like a line from a good song.

Today, Barack Obama is the first black president of the United States. Back then, in 2008, he was probably the best election campaigner of all time. And now he is on the campaign trail again. This fall he is speaking in Philadelphia, Chicago and Columbus, Ohio, spreading the message that "they" (the Republicans and their donors) want to rob "us" (open-minded, young Americans) of our future.

At the Crossroads

It is like a grown-up going back to the places of his youth: the public swimming pool where he learned to swim, the intersection where he had his first kiss. It's a sentimental journey, and at the same time an admission that youth doesn't last forever.

There are crossroads in every life, decisive moments. Afterwards, what was reality until a moment ago is just a memory, and the present has changed. The politician who once embodied a brave new alternative with his iconic slogan "Yes, we can" would probably love to be able to preserve his triumph as it was and hang on to the ease of those early, naive years. But that's not possible. Political careers succeed or fail - but they do not stop.

President Obama, who has been in office for 21 months, has gone gray during his time in the White House. He has become even thinner and wirier than he already was. He is campaigning this October because he has to. He is campaigning on behalf of those Democratic candidates who still stand a chance in the midterm elections on Nov. 2. If Obama is to have any chance of passing legislation in the next two years, his fellow Democrats must defend their majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives. In the last two weeks before the elections, Obama must reverse all the trends and bad poll ratings. To do that, he needs to create the illusion that it is indeed possible to reclaim your youth and your dreams, and that mistakes can be corrected -- even the one big mistake that changed everything.

Disappointment with Obama


Barack Obama is not a bad president. He is extremely eloquent, sharp-witted, and has certainly not lost any of his talent since moving into the Oval Office. Members of his staff say he still listens to what people say. A senator who once lost an election to Obama says the president demands dissenting opinions and that he's reliable, funny and works best under pressure.

Nor is he a weak president. He has begun withdrawing American troops from Iraq. He has been able to strengthen his alliances. And he has tackled the global economic crisis with an $800 billion stimulus package and a reform of the financial markets. His education policies target performance and aim to improve the disastrously under-resourced public school system. Millions of Americans have been dreaming of healthcare reform for decades. Bill Clinton failed to get it passed. Barack Obama succeeded.

Why then does it appear as if the American people would prefer to bring about a political stalemate between the White House and the two chambers of Congress, and thus ensure their own ungovernability, rather than giving the president a little more time? Why is the United States again leaning toward the kind of Republicans who have little to offer but tax cuts and who left Obama with a legacy of two wars and an economic crisis?

Because Barack Obama is not as good as he wanted to be.

Sometimes We Can

"Yes, we can," was boundless and absolute, a moment of political ecstasy. It was a movement, and a young one to boot. Since then, a qualifier has emerged: sometimes. Sometimes we can, sometimes we can't. That's political reality. That's the grown-up Obama, with all his shortcomings and weaknesses.

And there have been many weaknesses. Obama allowed Congress to negotiate the details of his healthcare reform while he deliberately held back. What emerged was a half-hearted reform that is complicated and that is really a reform of the health insurance system. But to get that reform, Obama used up his political capital, the one window of opportunity every new president gets.

Weren't there more urgent issues he could have tackled, like energy reform for example, which would have entailed a real change of direction and which would have meant re-educating America's consumers? Or what about the labor market? Obama admits he underestimated the problem of unemployment, which stubbornly hovers above 9 percent. He also concedes that he set himself up to be portrayed as yet another Democratic big spender who happily doles out tax dollars.

During the presidential election campaign, he masterfully controlled his public image. In office, however, he has been sending out some rather strange signals. As the BP oil spill was polluting the Gulf of Mexico, his wife and younger daughter flew to Spain, while the president himself played basketball with his chums. It gave the impression that Obama was part of a carefree, macho group that amused itself while the country suffered.

Obamaland Is No Longer United

Usually the president's team looks robust. It is filled with clever people who begin work at 6 in the morning and go home at 11 at night. But Obamaland is no longer the cohesive place it was during the presidential election, when everyone was united behind the same vision. Disappointed supporters are quitting, exhausted staff will leave after the midterms and the weak are being thrust aside. And when people talk about the mood in 2008, they sound like former classmates at a school reunion 20 years on: Remember when we were still young?

Obama has done little for African-Americans, and nothing for homosexuals. As a result he has lost voters on the left. It was inevitable, of course. Everyone who is elected in the US moves to the center when they come to office. But the fact that the president managed to lose the support of this middle ground too was a remarkable achievement.

It may well be that America can't simply walk out of Afghanistan, but nobody in the US understands this war any more. The conflict long ago ceased to be Bush's war, and is now Obama's. Worse still, it will inevitably end with an inglorious withdrawal. Why, then, should the US send in yet more troops? Why spend $100 billion a year waging war when train stations and schools back home are falling to pieces, and the money would be better spent on other American projects and research? Congress refuses to approve extra spending on renewing America: The money has already been spent.

Far from Perfect

When Obama came to office, the country craved perfection. His government is far from perfect, however. It's not even close.

But what is more appalling still, what is more shocking on so many levels, is the state of the nation -- the political stupidity of entire federal states and systems that seem hell-bent on self-destruction. Europe and the United States are much farther apart than many Europeans think. The US is different, completely and utterly different. Americans have a completely different understanding of social solidarity and the duties of the state.

But there are also contradictions. Millions of Americans want to reduce the power of the government, because that's the way their countrymen have always thought. Yet these same Americans want their president to lead them out of crisis. They want railway stations, schools and clean energy, but they don't want to pay taxes. They are the descendants of immigrants, and proud of it. But they oppose immigration.

Decades of prosperity have made the US a lethargic country. And in contrast to Europeans, whose lives and countries have been shaped by war, Americans are accustomed to feeling unique and invulnerable. They therefore react with near paranoia to a powerful China or a black president. Americans know they need change, yet they fear change. Such attitudes may be called schizophrenic. They're certainly a recipe for hysteria.

Hate-Mongers and Gun Freaks

The older, conservative German demonstrators who have recently been taking to the streets to protest against the controversial "Stuttgart 21" railway station project are the product of demographic change and their own fears. But the German protesters look absolutely harmless compared to America's hate-mongers, gun freaks and Tea Party demagogues who first compare Obama to Hitler and then minutes later to Stalin. They are people so filled with vitriol they can no longer think straight -- people like television presenter Glenn Beck, who says that putting the common good first is "exactly the kind of talk that led to the death camps in Germany." Beck has millions of followers, and appears in public with former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin, the darling of the Tea Party movement, who gleefully pronounces Obama's middle name Hussein as if it were a naughty, menacing word. Just two years ago, such things would have been taboo, and considered below-the-belt by Republicans.

This is the new atmosphere in America, and it is reflected in the Senate and the House of Representatives, two self-confident bodies populated by two political parties that eagerly take turns holding the reins of power. They paralyze themselves with rules that demand unattainable majorities for everything that is important. And even the Constitution irrevocably decrees that a senator from sparsely-populated Alaska has the same rights as a senator from New York.

The German media alternate on a daily basis between talking about "Obama's victory" and calling him a "loser." But often neither view is accurate, because the president has little or no influence over much of what is done, or not done, in the US and its 50 federal states.

Cries of Hate

Of course the American media is largely responsible for the impression people get of President Obama as well as the state of the nation as a whole. Fox News, Rupert Murdoch's TV news channel, has come to specialize in partisan mudslinging. Four of the potential future Republican presidential candidates are on Fox's payroll. The liberal channels are only different -- they are no longer any better. CNN has atrophied into a soapbox for journalist presenters. There is no analysis anymore on American TV, and little news -- only polemical attacks and shouting delivered in 90-second chunks.

Only the major newspapers still provide intelligent analysis, by people like the New York Times' insightful and levelheaded columnist David Brooks. Unfortunately, Obama's America is so polarized that the views of Brooks and his like are only read on the east and west coasts, and thus have little influence.

While the older, white hate mongers make loud noises, surveys show that the younger generation are generally satisfied with the direction their country is heading in. Or rather, they are indifferent, taking a benevolent view of the nice, pleasant adults, their nice, pleasant president and those wild stories about 2008. The haters, on the other hand, will go and vote in November.

Lost Dreams

Now they are calling Obama a "weakling." But that's not fair. Naturally Barack Obama reacts in a more mature, adult way than his predecessor, George W. Bush. The problem is simply that Obama is smaller than the promise he made, and tiny in comparison to the hopes an entire nation placed on him in 2008. There's one thing that Barack Obama failed to do. That was his real failure, the big mistake he made, back when everything seemed possible.

Barack Obama had a mandate. He promised to change America, change Washington and change the nation. He said that everyone would have to invest something and give something. He said that everyone would have to roll up their sleeves and work hard. Yet 69 million Americans still voted for him. Indeed, they elected him for precisely this reason.

Back then, Obama was like a high-school graduate who talked about wanting to sail around the globe, become a writer or a president. Instead, the dreamer started work as a trainee bank clerk. Now he has become a bank manager. It's certainly not a bad position, and he's doing rather well for himself. But every now and again he remembers who he once was and his dream about prolonging his youth. He knows it would have been difficult, but at least he could have given it a shot.

Only he didn't even try.

Translated from the German by Jan Liebelt

Source: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,723814,00.html


Discuss :)
 
Funny, I'm reading a very similar NY Times article that discusses this "lost magic" of Obama, and his failure to carry on his inspirational message from before the election, to after the election.

The Education of President Obama

Here's a snippet:

If there was something incongruous about the president of the United States checking out reviews of his d?cor by Arianna Huffington, well, let?s face it, he has endured worse reviews lately. The president who muscled through Congress perhaps the most ambitious domestic agenda in a generation finds himself vilified by the right, castigated by the left and abandoned by the middle. He heads into the final stretch of the midterm campaign season facing likely repudiation, with voters preparing to give him a Congress that, even if Democrats maintain control, will almost certainly be less friendly to the president than the one he has spent the last two years mud wrestling.

That presumes that what he did was the right thing, a matter of considerable debate. The left thinks he did too little; the right too much. But what is striking about Obama?s self-diagnosis is that by his own rendering, the figure of inspiration from 2008 neglected the inspiration after his election. He didn?t stay connected to the people who put him in office in the first place. Instead, he simultaneously disappointed those who considered him the embodiment of a new progressive movement and those who expected him to reach across the aisle to usher in a postpartisan age. On the campaign trail lately, Obama has been confronted by disillusionment ? the woman who was ?exhausted? defending him, the mother whose son campaigned for him but was now looking for work. Even Shepard Fairey, the artist who made the iconic multihued ?Hope? poster, says he?s losing hope.
 
There is a lot of anti Obama sentiment coming out. I'm seeing Hilary running in two years.
 
Americans: will she be better do you think?

Have the Republicans any one who is not completely 'off their trolley'?
 
Bill Clinton was the last good president we had. He had many problems (I'm not counting the sex scandal as I don't give a shit), but he is the last fiscally competent president we had in awhile. If Hilary follows that lead I'm all for her being president.
 
There is a lot of anti Obama sentiment coming out. I'm seeing Hilary running in two years.

If Republicans do not put up a worthy candidate, then she WILL be the next president. Absolutely sure of it.
I equate Obama and Congress as the frog in the boiling kettle. If Congress and the president ideas were water, they let the water boil and then dropped the frog, the American electorate, in. Naturally, the frog wanted to escape. If they had put the frog in first, then slowly upped the tempuature, the frog would not have noticed.
Too many ideas, too quickly, and too soon, from people who were and are inept at leadership. Also, I think our president has a real chip on his shoulder about the Regan legacy, and wants to eliminate and bury it once and for all.
George Bush, many faults aside, was a natural leader, and he surrounded himself with very competent and savvy people.
Obama...didn't!
 
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The SPIEGEL article confirms my current perception of the USA.

It reminds me of a seriously sick man, who stubbornly trusts in his own, mysterious self-healing powers instead of seeing a doctor.
 
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The SPIEGEL article confirms my current perception of the USA.

It reminds me of a seriously sick man, who stubbornly trusts in his own, mysterious self-healing powers instead of seeing a doctor.

And what perception is that? That Obama somehow couldn't communicate his strengths properly from his election to his term in office, it becomes the fault of the American public? This isn't 2004, and we haven't voted Bush into office again.

Gotta love foreigners who make sweeping generalizations on American politics and their citizens in general.
 
He has begun withdrawing American troops from Iraq.
iirc he tripled the number of troops in Iraq/Afghanistan when he first came to office and only recently began to slowly withdraw them. Yet my friend just shipped out to Iraq.


He has been able to strengthen his alliances.
Seems to me like he just went around ruining old alliances and kissing new ass.


And he has tackled the global economic crisis with an $800 billion stimulus package and a reform of the financial markets.
True but I don't think that all of that money benefited the country


His education policies target performance and aim to improve the disastrously under-resourced public school system.
Anyone have more info on this?


Millions of Americans have been dreaming of healthcare reform for decades. Bill Clinton failed to get it passed. Barack Obama succeeded.
Yes, he succeeded at being pushed around and failed at backing up his own plan. He also succeeded at pissing off a LOT of Americans.


Weren't there more urgent issues he could have tackled, like energy reform for example, which would have entailed a real change of direction and which would have meant re-educating America's consumers? Or what about the labor market?
Well fuck me sideways till next Tuesday... I've been saying that since 2008.


Obama admits he underestimated the problem of unemployment, which stubbornly hovers above 9 percent.
Real unemployment, mind you, is around 17%...


During the presidential election campaign, he masterfully controlled his public image. In office, however, he has been sending out some rather strange signals. As the BP oil spill was polluting the Gulf of Mexico, his wife and younger daughter flew to Spain, while the president himself played basketball with his chums. It gave the impression that Obama was part of a carefree, macho group that amused itself while the country suffered.
Ehh... I cant believe I'm actually defending Obama on something but I don't see a problem with this. Do you expect him to put in 24-hour work days? Or maybe he should have gone to the Gulf with a shamwow?


Obama has done little for African-Americans, and nothing for homosexuals.
He has done little for anyone. Although I do remember that one of the first things he did when he moved into the 'House was hold a huge reception/dinner for the LGBT community.


Why spend $100 billion a year waging war when train stations and schools back home are falling to pieces, and the money would be better spent on other American projects and research?
Because many members of our government appear to think that we have an unlimited budget? How else do you explain the fact that we owe around 90% (iirc its between 90 and 100, don't remember the exact number) of GDP? Spending money on schools seems useless to me, btw - we need a major education reform because our current system, quite frankly, sucks.


Millions of Americans want to reduce the power of the government, because that's the way their countrymen have always thought. Yet these same Americans want their president to lead them out of crisis. They want railway stations, schools and clean energy, but they don't want to pay taxes. They are the descendants of immigrants, and proud of it. But they oppose immigration.
The government lead us into this crisis, so now they need to help us get out of it. Only extremists want zero government intervention; even most Republicans realize that some minimal amount of government control is necessary to guide, not run the economy to make sure that the free market system doesn't screw itself in the ass via some silly loophole (hello Freddie and Fannie).


They therefore react with near paranoia to a powerful China or a black president.
Paranoia about a black president? I'm sorry, did we not elect him?
And China... The fourth largest country in the world with a population approaching 1.4 billion and an economy that's growing at unprecedented rates... I wouldn't say we need to worry but we should certainly follow the politics in China closely.
I, for one, am not too worried about China. They cant sustain the crazy rate of growth forever. In fact, didn't they just raise the interest rate?


Hate-Mongers and Gun Freaks
Gun freaks? Oh wait, this is a German writing who is just jealous that he can't carry one. Excuse us for wanting the ability to protect ourselves and our loved ones when the zombie apocalypse (read: burglar) comes.


While the older, white hate mongers make loud noises, surveys show that the younger generation are generally satisfied with the direction their country is heading in. Or rather, they are indifferent...
This. Hippies love Obama because they are too stupid and high to know... well, anything. They just associate the Democratic party with peace and love for all. Others like Obama simply because the Reps don't seem to have a half-decent candidate. Everyone else is in the middle and doesn't know which way to swing. I think the Democrats' fate rests on whether or not the Republicans can find a decent candidate: if Sarah Palin runs then a Democratic turd can be our next president.
 
He quite clearly put his own personal opinions (He hates the Brits for the war in Kenya in the 1950's) ahead of his countries' interests - he gave Gordon Brown 20 Region 1 DVDs as a gift - wow lots of thought went into that.

Gave back the Churchill bust too.

These things are noticed when they stand out from the norm.

If I were American I'd have voted for US Senator John S. McCain III (Arizona) myself - Obama he was too smooth - sort of reminded me of Tony Blair.
 
If I were American I'd have voted for US Senator John S. McCain III (Arizona) myself - Obama he was too smooth - sort of reminded me of Tony Blair.
I did. McCain wouldn't have made a good president but I just couldn't bring myself to vote for Obama. Lesser of two evils yada yada
 
McCain proved he would not be a good president when he chose Palin as a running mate. If he makes a decision like that on the campaign trail, just imagine what he'd have done in office.
 
And what perception is that? That Obama somehow couldn't communicate his strengths properly from his election to his term in office, it becomes the fault of the American public? This isn't 2004, and we haven't voted Bush into office again.

Gotta love foreigners who make sweeping generalizations on American politics and their citizens in general.

Oh, it isn't just a subjective perception. I studied the "American Way of Life" and the post-war U.S. history a bit. And there is a familiar pattern of an "all will be good, because this is America and we are Americans" behaviour, which worked as long as the USA was the undisputed No. 1 nation in the world. But that status is eroding now, so the old recipe of simply trusting in the nation's ability of ghost healing doesn't work anymore (I elaborated on this in another thread here before).

In previous crises, the USA used to be the engine that pulled the rest of the world with it. Now it seems like they're stuck in the mud, with the motivation to get out on their own on an all-time low. One part of the country wants even more public spending, meaning more debts and more inflation, the other part wants to cut costs at any price (without touching the defense budget of course) and lower the taxes instead. Both won't work in my opinion.

A couple of days back I read about the ARC Tunnel project to connect Manhattan with New Jersey and how it is currently being blocked by opposing state governments. I think this is symptomatic of the deadlock the whole nation seems to be in at the moment and I don't see a way out of it for some time. Seems like the old strategy of simply starting huge infrastructure projects in times of a crisis doesn't work anymore. I think I read that most of the 800 billion Dollars of the recovery plan have already been spent -- without having much of an effect.

The only way out I can think of, would mean to bring down the general standard of living (which is based on debt) and invest more into industrial production again, so that the country can pull itself out of the swamp eventually by its own hair. But that's going to take time. Currently the USA are clearly missing an industrial backbone, which could throw on the engine to overcome the crisis.

Meanwhile the middle class is vanishing, poverty is growing stronger without an effective social net to catch people, when they fall, and all that is hardly going to change anytime soon, because of the above mentioned deadlock. This could lead into a very explosive situation. But realization of all that still seems to be a hard thing.

As much as I want to, though, I have no answers for the problem. So I can only name it. It took 60 years to drive the USA into its current state and it won't be out of it so quickly and so easily again. For the most part of these 60 years the effects were concealed by a general "we are invincible and unvulnerable" feeling, which worked for a time. It would probably still work, if the Eastern Block hadn't collapsed and if the Asian nations hadn't woken up economically.

One of my horror visions of the nearer future is a nearly bankrupt USA with an ailing economcy and a population, that is losing more and more of its wealth, while still clinging onto the biggest and deadliest war machine humanity has ever seen. The implications and consequences could be devastating.
 
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Applies to Britain 100% too. MacGuffin

I suppose our one saving grace is that it was both ourselves and our "friends" that made sure of it - the US have done it to themselves.
 
This probably does very little to refute some of your points but...


..."all will be good, because this is America and we are Americans"[/I] behaviour, which worked as long as the USA was the undisputed No. 1 nation in the world.
america2.jpeg

Still number one baby! Hates gunna hate!



In previous crises, the USA used to be the engine that pulled the rest of the world with it. Now it seems like they're stuck in the mud, with the motivation to get out on their own on an all-time low.
Low? More like low-range! We live for the mud!
mud01.jpg




That said,
I think I read that most of the 800 billion Dollars of the recovery plan have already been spent -- without having much of an effect.
The effect was that we didn't sink even further; liquidity trap and all that...


The only way out I can think of, would mean to bring down the general standard of living (which is based on debt) and invest more into industrial production again, so that the country can pull itself out of the swamp eventually by its own hair.
Bring down the standard of living? Are you serious?
 
I didn't vote for either McCain nor Obama, and I don't feel bad about it at all. Neither would have/ is a good president.

I will vote for a president who holds any of these ideas (I'm not a check list Republican and can compromise):

1) Get the fuck out of the Middle East. It is draining our economy.
2) Cut down the size of the military. I'm all for a strong military, but we don't need one as large as we have now permanently. Hell it may even make us less war mongering.
3) Throw out our current "funnel tax dollars to the health industry" universal heath care and set it up properly. France has the best health care system in the world, why don't we copy them?
 
Applies to Britain 100% too. MacGuffin

I suppose our one saving grace is that it was both ourselves and our "friends" that made sure of it - the US have done it to themselves.

Well, not entirely. At least Britain is also willing to cut the military costs. I just saw on the news that the aircraft carrier "Ark Royal" and all its Harrier jets will be mothballed. The new government seems to mean business. They have to. Britain is almost as dead in the water as Greece.

Bring down the standard of living? Are you serious?

What I mean is, that the sense of having really earned the wealth they live in, has disappeared. If you finance your wealth on borrowed money, you didn't earn it, you simply borrowed it at the cost of your future. I don't want to promote poverty but don't you agree, that in large parts of the population the (unearned) wealth has brought some obscene results and a certain amount of decadence? I simply call for modesty for a change -- while you still have time to choose it freely.
 
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3) Throw out our current "funnel tax dollars to the health industry" universal heath care and set it up properly. France has the best health care system in the world, why don't we copy them?

Guess what is financing the French system. Disclaimer: I'm not saying anything about anything.
 
France is also up in barricades these days, because they simply want to make the people work almost as long as in other European countries, before they go into retirement... Merde...

Meanwhile in Germany they're protesting against a new train station. We really must have no worries here.
 
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