WHAT Barack Obama can actually accomplish as President of the United States will depend less on his impressive political and rhetorical talents than on the balance of political and social forces in the country.
We should not forget that John McCain, the ageing and intellectually-challenged Republican candidate, along with Sarah Palin, his divisive, ignorant, resentful running mate, managed to obtain an impressive 46 per cent of the vote. Now, as much as 25 per cent of the population regard themselves as dispossessed by having to endure the Obama family in the White House.
The media are full of injunctions to the President not to listen to the left. It is almost as if the radical The Nation newspaper sold two million copies every week instead of the rather more modest 200,000. In fact, the American left is a disordered alliance of cultural, economic, environmental, ethnic and racial interest groups with no unifying common denominator or historical project. Even before the present economic crisis, American majorities approved a large regulatory and redistributive role for government. However, they were not organised to convert opinion into legislation.
Now Obama has indicated that he will not back the trade unions’ plan for legislation which would make recruiting members and obtaining bargaining rights easier. This is despite having indicated otherwise during the presidential election campaign.
Obama’s legal appointees have intimated that the detention centre on Guantanamo Bay will be closed, but not immediately.
On foreign policy in general, there is silence. The new President will not send the Sixth Fleet to Gaza on a humanitarian aid mission or suspend arms deliveries to Israel in order to examine the legality, under international and national law, of their use against the Palestinians. Instead, there may be very slow progress toward rationality of American policy in the Middle East, but hardly immediate liberation from the strange version of Babylonian captivity.
There are profound economic arguments for reducing the country’s swollen arms budget. In the report of the National Intelligence Council, Global 2025, the CIA has warned that the end of US hegemony is already a fact. The astute and intelligent Obama is perfectly aware of this situation, as is Hillary Clinton, his very capable Secretary of State, and the scholarly retired General James Jones, his National Security Advisor.
Obama has decided that the intensifying crisis of American capitalism must be his primary concern. He also seems to have concluded that America’s dysfunctional political institutions do not allow too many disturbing truths to be communicated all at once.
In his autobiography, Obama recounts how, as a student, he devoted days and nights to reading the contemporary classics on the possibility of social transformation. So let us wish him well in the most challenging time of his life and trust that the middle-aged statesman plunging into the turbulence of history will not forget the young man seeking hope.
Norman Birnbaum is an emeritus professor at the Georgetown University Law Centre and a member of The Nation’s editorial board
