“I KEEP on waking up and thinking that it is all a dream.” Barack Obama could be forgiven for sharing John Prescott’s thoughts after Labour’s 1997 election landslide, a victory built on a deep and passionate hunger for “change” among an electorate which had long despaired of the incumbent party in government and its leader.
Only the nihilistically cynical would detract from the scale of the new President-elect’s achievement in what is one of the most historic and pivotal elections in the history of the United States. The result itself represents a radical transformation of the American political map. But only the most starry-eyed would fail to see that it raises questions about what it means deep down for American politics and the future policies of President Obama’s White House.
Some of those leaving London’s south bank celebrations in the bright new dawn of Tony Blair’s “new” Labour project did so with a mixture of exultation and trepidation. We’d had the dream. Now came the expectations. And so with Mr Obama, though the message which the election of the first black US President sends out to the world is of immeasurably greater scale than that “new” Labour victory. It marks a symbolic turning point in the 300-year-old struggle against racial prejudice, discrimination and brutality.
And it marks a practical rejection of the neo-conservative Reaganomics which, as practiced under the Bush regime, saw five million more people plunged into poverty as the economy crashed under its burden of greed and a tax system which shifted the burden from the rich to the poor, a crumbling national infrastructure, health and energy crises, a five-year war in Iraq and an escalating conflict in Afghanistan. Presiding over that was one of the worst, and most unpopular, presidents in the history of the United States.
There are those who say it had to get this bad before America would swallow the prospect of electing a black president. Yet the long queues, the size of the turnout and its psephological breadth, including the young and women as well as black voters, testified to Mr Obama’s charismatic, calm, unifying and inclusive campaign style. The campaign itself, which succeeded in persuading so many voters to register for the first time, reached out with a mix of timeless traditional methods, disciplined organisation, “new” technologies such as the Internet and a degree of trusting bottom-up self-organisation. It is a model the Labour Party should take a close look at emulating.
Yet this was no revolution and Mr Obama is not, as some of his opponents attempted to label him, a socialist. He is a pragmatic centrist, which, in comparison to the present White House, is a lurch to the left. He will inherit two wars and a hollowed out economy, with a national debt that has doubled to $10 trillion. From America’s massive overseas military presence to its role in bringing the world out of recession, an Obama White House will be watched keenly around the globe.
So what should we expect? A “new deal” plan based on the creation of a national infrastructure reinvestment bank has been promised to reverse the decay of roads, bridges and the transport system, creating possibly millions of jobs and tied in with greater regulation of the financial system and major investment in the green-energy sector and ambitious caps on carbon emissions.
Mr Obama’s strategy for Iraq and Afghanistan indicate – at this stage before the Pentagon hawks have got to him – an understanding of the role that those countries’ internal politics, culture and differences, although his promise of a timetabled withdrawal from Iraq – a war he opposed – has to be set against a prospective new “surge” in Afghanistan.
If he is to start to repair America’s moral credibility in the international community, he should shut down Guantanamo and ban the use of torture by US troops. He must act on his avowed willingness to talk to Iran to prevent his threat of air strikes being tested. And he should re-engage the US positively with the United Nations while closing down its propensity to act unilaterally as a rogue state.
Perhaps then an Obama presidency will make the world a safer place. It would be a start. Now we can but hope.
About The Author
I think that one infrastructure project that President Obama should consider is the Trans-Global Highway, proposed by Frank X. Didik a number of years ago. According to Didik, the proposed “highway”, which would contain roads, rail roads, water, oil and gas pipes as well electric and communication cables. The highway would use and standardize the existing road networks and build new roads as well as a number of key tunnels. Interestingly, the longest Tunnel in the proposal, would still be shorter than the longest existing tunnel today. It would seem that there are many advantages to the construction of the Trans Global Highway including vastly lower cost and faster shipping, better allocation of resources, the ability of utilizing raw materials and much lower carbon emissions, than the existing transportation system. The highway would open up a new era of international cooperation. The Trans-Global Highway site is located at http://www.TransGlobalHighway.com