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Obama 2.0: tense days ahead

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THE divided soul of the United States has been analyzed well by Noam Chomsky who observed that the 2012 presidential election’s voting pattern is reminiscent of the American Civil War of the 1860s. President Barack Obama needs to involve both sides of the divide to save his country from the impending fiscal peril. But the job is not going to be easy.

As Obama won, racist insults could be heard even in such liberal havens like Boston, making one wonder about the morphing of the American dream. It appears that a section of the US electorate has declared that despite his re-election, the current resident of the White House will not be considered as their leader. The US seems to have suddenly turned its back on its widely cited ‘bipartisanship’ because this virtue has been denied to Obama by the hardline conservatives.

It is evident that Barack Obama, while a charismatic crowd puller is not a great party manager or a bipartisan leader. He can shrewdly strategize election campaigns but cannot manage relations between parties. The task of party management and power shuffling – much needed in Washington, DC – is done by Joe Biden and a team of the president’s astute colleagues in the White House. Even more telling was the reliance on former President Bill Clinton, a liberal from the southern states, right from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in early September.

As a result, while Obama has managed to keep the flag of the Democratic Party flying over the White House, and also the party in good shape as the United States becomes more multiethnic, less Anglo-Saxon and more coloured – he is not accepted as the ultimate authority as far as the various layers of state are concerned. Obama has delegated responsibility of reaching out to his opponents to those that his opponents find less divisive, that is the Clinton-Biden-Kerry trio and his in-house advisor, David Axelrod.

That means the president handles certain functions but deploys other crisis managers while responding to the growing social and political gulf that has been impeding his functionability as president. This arrangement is unique and unprecedented, given the divided state of the United States. It appears as if Obama has given up on reaching out to the other side and is ‘managing’ the divide by employing those who can reach out on his behalf.

Further complicating matters for Obama is that, unable to accept the demographic and cultural changes in the United States, the conservative sections – earlier divided between the Republican and the Democratic parties – have gone autonomous and become radicalized and turned the legislative wing, notably the House of Representatives, into an arena to flex muscles. As a result of this kind of polarization, the tried and tested old ‘balance of power’ between the legislative and executive wings of the government has been replaced with unprecedented filibustering which has paralyzed decision making in domestic affairs by the White House. Beyond that, the mindless attack on the president emanating from several House members indicates that the fight is not merely ideological or political. There is ‘something more’ to the irritant that has been ignited between the two sides.

That ‘something more’ is the political instinct of Barack Obama and his ability to court the new political actors in a fast-changing US society. Obama’s America is in the midst of the biggest ethnic change in US history resulting from decades of economy driven immigration to the United States. That means the United States has developed sizable communities of voter blocks that are not fully understood by all sections of US politics. Obama is the first President of the United States who has taken political risks in courting new constituencies – some of which are totally unacceptable to the conservatives.

In his search for solid voting blocks from women, Obama hung on to the issue of reproductive rights of women. This, for the Christian conservatives, is a deadly sin and, in part, explains their vicious attack as also the opposition of the extreme movement of the Tea Party. Even more important was Obama’s incredible gamble over the rights of same-sex couples in the United States, in his TV appearance on 9 May, a few days after observing the first anniversary of the Abbottabad raid in Pakistan that killed Osama Bin Laden. It is possible to speculate that Obama took advantage of his strength in one sector to push for a radical agenda in another. In an interview given to the ABC network, he said that he took the initiative to disclose his approval for gay-marriage in the US in part because of Mitt Romney’s threat that if elected he would enact a federal law banning marriage between same sex couples. Such was the domestic impact of the interview that TV channels in the United States declared the interview as a moment of great social and cultural importance in the United States.

But the interview revolted many. Rabble rousers like Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan, condemned Obama for not going with the scriptures that he believed in and even mocked the marriage between Michele and Barack Obama.

Obama showed that he was willing to gamble in an unprecedented manner. All through his election campaign, Obama stuck to his stated positions on abortion, same-sex couples and the immigrant communities, despite the fact that these three categories are not always mutually compatible. A single mother raising a child might well be religious and find same-sex union difficult to accept. Equally, the Hispanics in the United States, who are mostly staunch family-oriented Catholics, usually find Obama’s opinions on same sex rights and abortion deeply troubling.

But here lies the real method in the democratic madness of Barack Obama: For each group, Obama targeted the issue that was on top of their list of priorities. For the Hispanics, who are currently the second largest and the fastest growing community in the US due to both legal and undocumented immigration, the most important issue is speedy legalization of their immigrant status. Obama promised them just what they wanted. The reform in the immigration process aimed at the Latino community in the US brought rich dividend to Obama in his re-election. The Hispanics who form a large chunk of urban votes in the United States secured Obama’s win in two key states – Florida and Ohio.

As a political visionary, Obama was cashing in on an opportunity that existed at the electoral moment by mobilizing support on social issues; his proposal of granting citizenship to undocumented Hispanic workers equally showed that Obama had better assessed changing ground reality in the states to create a different national identity in the United States. Samuel Huntington in ‘Who Are We’ criticized such a rainbow identity as opposed to the dominant White Anglo-Saxon identity. In this essay, Huntington had warned that the US was on its way to become something different from its founding Anglo-Saxon identity.

Surprisingly, despite his social radicalism, Obama played his cards on economic issues on totally conservative lines. A major contribution in understanding Obama’s behaviour in stemming economic crisis in the US has come from Neil Barofsky, the former inspector general employed by Obama for the Troubled Assets Relief Programme (TARP). Barofsky revealed damaging information about Obama’s handling of the economic mess. He claimed that the entire bank bailout programme was being managed from inside by the banking lobby and in many cases by retired bankers who joined government for a career in public service. Barofsky was hounded out of DC due to his tough stance against extending bank bailouts to the fragile financial institutions.

However, despite Barofsky’s revelations, newspaper reports in October hinted that it was Romney and not Obama, who had emerged as the new favourite of the banks. Media reports suggested that Romney got more funds for his campaign to fix the US economy in the good old ways of promoting small business – if necessary through laxly regulated environment standards and energy policy domestically.

Perhaps around the time Obama went social-radical, he also dumped the Wall Street mentality, at least verbally. This was amply evident as he repeatedly asserted, in the campaign in September and October, that the rich must pay more tax and tax evasion was not a great American virtue. What might have moved Obama was the reality shock of the ‘fiscal cliff’ which will have to be dealt with in his first year in office.

Obama’s economic radicalism is clearly meant for the ‘fiscal cliff’ management which can no longer wait as it will automatically be upon the US economy by the end of the year due to the expiry of decade long tax cuts. Here lies the problem: Obama cannot fix the economy without help from those he has antagonized with his social agenda.

The conservative backlash against Obama has shaped the House of Representatives over the last four years. The backlash has become stronger with Obama’s support for reproductive rights and gay rights. But, for his single-most important initiative on economic recovery, that is an across the board rise in taxes and spending cuts, the legislative wing is indispensable. So will the legislative wing come along to save the economic plan of the president who, according to them, is a threat to American ideals? Or will they just embarrass the president and bring the US to a fiscal cliff?

This is a major point of tension in the US today and despite cautious comments from the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, it remains to be seen how he will convince Tea Party members in the House who, so far, have shown no signs of understanding Obamanomics. The Tea Party school, for instance, totally opposes any rise in tax for any section without specifying their own economic vision.

Though it is too early to explain the exact fallout of the social divisions between the diverse and multi-ethnic population of the United States in the 21st century, the early signs of the confessional nature of the American power structure are becoming visible. It appears that the various sections of the US society will now be represented in different parts of the state structive as per a tacit understanding over power sharing. Given the history of the Civil War and frequent civil discord and urban riots, it would thus not be unfair to describe the United States as a superpower with feet of clay.

Perhaps it is an irony of the globalized era that a country that sought to become the eye of financial stability has indeed turned into an eye of a global financial contagion. Michael Lewis, author of the bestseller Boomeranged: Travels in the New Third World, suggests that the enormous flight of capital from the United States is inter-generational in nature, vindication of which has also come from the Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg who, in a paper about the gloomy debt scenario after Obama’s re-election, wrote that the debt figure is so high that the United States cannot pay it back in his generation. Obama has indulged in ‘perception management’ to hide the fatal flaws of the economy he inherited. To fix it he will need to manage the paradox that, despite his unifying slogans, the United States today is more divided that it was five years ago.

Kallol Bhattacherjee

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