Robert Taylor has been studying the new President’s writings for signs of where great expectations might lead
THE inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States is arousing extraordinary expectations in his own country and throughout the world. And yet the 47-year-old black American faces the worst domestic circumstances of any of his predecessors in the White House since Franklin D Roosevelt in the depths of the Great Depression in March 1933. As millions lose their jobs, great companies collapse, the housing market implodes and national debts and bailouts have climbed to an unbelievable $14 billion, it is Obama who is seen as the great saviour of a reckless and corrupt capitalism that has brought Wall Street to its knees and the manufacturing sector to the brink of collapse.
The desperation of the American economy is not the only grim item on President Obama’s crowded agenda. The Middle East – from Gaza to Iraq, from Iran to Afghanistan and Pakistan – threatens to wreck his presidency from its very first day. The brutal invasion of Gaza by a ruthless Israeli government with aim of wiping out Hamas may lead in turn to an aerial assault on Iran to slow down its nuclear programme while Jewish settlements keep on growing across the West Bank, making talk of a two-state solution mere deceptive rhetoric.
Some on the left – such as journalists John Pilger and Alexander Cockburn – are already denouncing Obama before he moves into the White House. The familiar language of betrayal can be heard among liberals who have spent most of their lives enduring disappointment and defeat. Are such attitudes either sensible or justified?
Perhaps some important clues to what we might expect from an Obama presidency can be found in the pages of his brilliant book, The Audacity of Hope – Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (published by Canongate, price £8.99). In what must rate as the most perceptive and elegantly written political testament of any American President, Obama sets out in thought-provoking and vivid terms the beliefs and values that we can expect will shape the way he deals with the formidable problems he must confront.
What are so strikingly revealed in his book are his calmness and intelligence, sophistication and nuanced tolerance. To use words such as “pragmatic” and “centrist” is to over-simplify the nature of his appeal among millions of Americans across the partisan divide of their country’s tribal politics. As Obama wrote in 2007, he had in mind governing for “those ordinary citizens who have grown up in the midst of all the political and cultural battles but who have found a way – in their own lives at least – to make peace with their neighbours and themselves”.
While his remarkable book links real, complicated people to his enduring values, it is not ideological in tone. Obama believes citizens are “waiting for a politics with the maturity to balance idealism and realism, to distinguish between what can and cannot be compromised. They don’t always understand the arguments between right and left, conservative and liberal, but they recognise the difference between dogma and common sense, responsibility and irresponsibility, between those things that last and those that are fleeting”.
Obama argues that Americans hold “shared values” that determine the way they run their lives and these provide “the cornerstone of any meaningful debate about budgets and projects, regulations and policies”. First and foremost is the American belief in individual freedom accompanied by the values of thrift and personal responsibility, of drive, discipline, temperance and hard work rooted above all in a “basic optimism about life and a faith in free will – a confidence that through pluck and sweat, each of us can rise above the circumstances of our birth”.
But such freedom is not enough. It is bound – Obama argues – “by a set of communal values” based on family, neighbourhood, church and community and a faith “in something bigger than ourselves”. Obama has a love and understanding of his country’s history based on serious reading and thought. His heroes are Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Martin Luther King. Obama ends his book with an evocative description of an early evening walk in Washington that ends up at the Lincoln Memorial.
Obama writes: “In that place, I think about America and those who built it. The nation’s founders, who somehow rose above petty ambitions and narrow calculations to imagine a nation unfurling across a continent. And those of Lincoln and King who ultimately laid down their lives in the service of perfecting an imperfect union. And all the faceless, nameless men and women, slaves and soldiers and tailors and butchers, constructing lives for themselves and their children and grandchildren, brick by brick, rail by rail, calloused hand by calloused hand, to fill in the landscape of our collective dreams.” The eloquence of his prose carries its own dangers that he is well aware of.
In his subtle thoughts on foreign affairs Obama emphasises the need for international co-operation, for engagement and “soft” power. But he is not naive and he is ready to use military force, even in a pre-emptive way, to further his country’s perceived interests. He admires the generation which practised containment in the early years of the Cold War, but he argues for staying the course in Afghanistan. However, Obama also wants to make sure that US policies “move the international system in the direction of greater equity, justice and prosperity, that the rules we promote serve both our interests and those of a struggling world”. But he rejects liberating other people single handed from tyranny. He says wisely: “There are few examples in history in which the freedom men and women crave is delivered through outside intervention’.
On Israel and Palestine, Obama comments, after looking down on the religious sites of Jerusalem: “I considered the two thousand years of war that this small plot of land had come to represent and pondered the possible futility of believing this conflict might somehow end in our time or that America, for all its power, might have any lasting say over the course of the world.”
Obama has no big plan either to save his country from what might yet turn into a depression greater than that of the 1930s. There is little economics in his book. But he does show a less than ideological belief in the virtue of unfettered markets and he holds a strong commitment to the use of active government, especially through strong programmes on healthcare and education, and building a new social contract in which the rich recognise their wider responsibilities and the state helps complete the civil rights campaign, improve training and support the inner city poor and immigrant labour to find a better life. Perhaps, like FDR, he will try often-contradictory policies to see what works best. His economics team is experienced and distinguished, but it will be a tough and painful road ahead.
It is perhaps a reflection of these terrible times that Obama’s race and relatively humble background are matters that no longer attract much attention. But one thing is certain. No European country – certainly not Britain – could produce a phenomenon like Obama. Lincoln once described his country as the “last, best hope of mankind” in the midst of the American Civil War. Yet again in its history, as Obama takes the presidential oath, that noble sentiment resonates. Of course, it is overly romantic, perhaps naive and based more on faith than reason. Interestingly enough, however, it was his pastor, Jeremiah “God damn America” Wright, who provided the title of Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope. This January, amid the gloom of war and depression, Obama is taking on what the satirical Onion magazine headlined as “the worst job in America”. At least after the George W Bush years of greed and imperialism, we can expect genuine change for the good. “Yes, we can.”
