Obstacles to Obama's Change

I am already hearing strange things coming from the USA in the wake of Barack Obama's victory in the presidential election. The odd rumours that he was going to plunge the USA into some kind of race war and that black people will be favoured over any others. Bizarrely people did not say when George W. Bush was elected that they feared a class war or that the super-rich would be favoured over everyone else. I was fearful up to the last that this election would resemble the UK election of 1992 at which it was assumed that the Labour Party would win and end 13 years of bleak Conservative rule. However, at the last, the 'grey man', John Major pulled off a surprise victory which led to a further 5 years of Conservative rule, whilst not as proactively nasty as the period under Thatcher, still a period of economic troubles and social division. Major was held by the eccentricities of the British electoral system just as Bush had been aided by the eccentricities of the US system in 2000. Thus, it is heartening that Obama won with such a majority, 364 of the college votes to McCain's 162, which was 94 more than the 270 Obama needed to win. The fact that he took all the Great Lake states shows the advantage for the Democrats of selecting him over Clinton. Also vitally important is the fact that the Democrats have majorities in both houses of Congress and Obama will not face the opposition to policies from that quarter that previous Democrat politicians have faced.

In 1997 when Tony Blair won the election in the UK for New Labour with the largest majority in living memory people expected radical change in British society of the kind they are expecting from Obama. Of course many people had been deluded and they had elected not a Labour government but a Blairite government, which effectively was simply an invigorated version of the Major Conservative government which had just led office. Naturally the reason why Blair attracted support was that he was not radical and presented no threat to the majority of the British public who are conservative and want the status quo maintained in so many aspects of British life, even if that leads to a weaker economy and wide social division. They always see the reason in scapegoats rather than realising that the UK needed substantial change.


I feel, and I hope I am right, that Obama represents a government that actually does want true change rather than simply using the rhetoric of it. To some degree there would have been change whoever had been elected President in the USA or if there had been no outcome and the Speaker of the House of Representatives had stepped in to fill the gap. This is because Bush was utterly incompetent. He lacked the intelligence to run a company let alone a country. He did not really even effectively carry out the Republican agenda. It was embarrassing to see him speak because he simply showed up his ignorance and inability to address the office he held. Even Ronald Reagan, despite his substantial flaws, came across as slightly more in control, and that is a shocking comparison to have to make. In fact John F. Kennedy dead, would have made a better president that Bush alive, because even though his image has been augmented beyond the truth, his legend presents a better guide to how the USA should be run than Bush ever could.


Though I am not doubtful of Obama's sincere wish to change the USA, I think still faces major challenges in bringing about genuine reform. The first problem is that people are so willing to believe the lies. Hearing white Americans from states that elected Obama, commenting that he will be running the USA like an African state, shows the level of racism still prevalent in the USA. All the rumours around Barack Obama being a Kenyan were also silly. Anyone who knows the US constitution would know if that had been the case he never would have been able to stand for the position (this is why Arnold Schwarznegger can never be US President under current laws) and the Democratic Party would have never made such a blunder. Such a level of ignorance opens people up to believe whatever lies are levelled at the new president and Obama is constantly going to have to fight such ridiculous stories even before he can explain his policies. What these people do not realise is that Obama represents so many aspects of the 'American dream'. All people in the USA are immigrants. Even the ancestors of the native Americans, immigrate into the continent from Asia. Many people in the USA have ancestors of different races, Barack Obama has a white mother and a black father. Obama, his parents and his wife all benefited from the US attitude to education which sees it as a way to get on and improve yourself. So, attempts to portray Obama as somehow alien to US culture fails immediately.

The other key obstacles to Obama will come from vested interests. The US$ did go from US$1.67 to £1 to US$1.58, but we have not seen the stock exchange 'bounce' that you usually witness following a US election no matter who has won. This is partly due to the ongoing financial crisis, but also shows that the super-rich know that their man, Bush, is going and they will not receive such preferential treatment as they have seen since 2000. Bush said these people were his core constituency and his policies have been mainly to help them. He secured Iraqi oil to keep it out of the hands of the Chinese and he baled out the banks who had brought themselves down by their greed. Such policies will not be pursued by Obama. In fact quite likely they would not have been pursued by McCain. However, I will anticipate a capital flight from the USA as the big investors seek to salt away funds so that they will not be asked to contribute to social reform programmes in the USA. Bush did do one thing in Obama's favour by nationalising AIG in September. This could provide a useful basis for a reformed social insurance scheme for the USA and the stigma of 'creeping Socialism' which has long been used against real social reform in the USA can be diverted to Bush's lap rather than Obama's.

In introducing reforms especially in economic and the social sectors, Obama will face the might of US big business. Brown has seen how tough this can be in the UK when he tried to introduce a windfall tax on the very wealthy power companies here, and Obama will face similar opposition, effectively blackmailing the president by holding consumers to ransom. Both Brown and Obama need to gain state control of the real levers of the economy whilst facing condemnation that this is 'wrong', 'dictatorial' or 'unhealthy' in a 'free' market economy. Of course there is no 'free' market it is just the way those who actually control it portray it. Markets have always been manipulated, since the 1980s almost exclusively in favour of those who already have money and power so they can protect and augment that money and power and reduce the gains of the rest of society made in the 1940s-1970s. Obama will not be able to overturn such ingrained power, especially as the 'norm' now says that state intervention is evil, when in fact it can really benefit far more people than any effect of the market could ever do. It would take at least a decade to shift away from this terrible 'free' market attitude that shackles so many people to life without opportunity. If Obama was becoming president after 8 years of the Gore administration, well then, things might be different, but unfortunately this is real history not a 'what if?'. Divisive, super-rich friendly policies are so fixed into Western societies that it is going to require more than one or two terms of office to alter them.

Obama will not only face harsh opposition from those who have power but also often from the ordinary people who will actually benefit from his reforms. It is fascinating how hostile the ordinary American is to policies which would actually help them (many Britons are the same though). They have been so misled by politicians like Bush to think that anything which makes the USA a more socially equal place or at least one where the people at the bottom (the majority) do not suffer so much, is somehow unpatriotic. Too many Americans believe that they will gain through force. This is why there is so much adherence to the use of guns. People feel they buy them a place in society whereas in fact they just contribute further to the deterioration of that society. The post-apocalyptic myths are still too strong in the USA. Too many Americans believe that in a 'simpler' society they would be better off, whereas in fact, those with the power currently would be the barons of such a landscape. More Americans, whites particularly, need to see how their ancestors were exploited and had short, bleak lives. They were not successful or powerful, they were ground down in the way current working class is by the US system. Despite this somehow many white Americans in that category today see such a society as being better. Blacks look back to slavery and can see how things have improved, but whites need to learn much more how far they have come in the past century in the USA but also how much further they could go if they did not think a gun buys them a good life. Of course one great fear is that someone will assassinate Obama. Of course it will win him yet more profile in history but it will deny the ordinary American the reform they need and the rest of the World the peace they require.

For the sake of the World I wish Barack Obama all the best in trying to bring about change. However, I am not going to be among the critics in 2012 complaining that he has not changed much at all, because I am already aware of how many people with so much power and wealth, aided by the entrenched attitudes of so many others, will be out to stop him.

Does Barack Obama's Success Mark Growing Maturity in US Politics?

For citizens of the UK, especially in recent years, we look on the US presidential race with a combination of alarm and powerlessness. Certainly since the Reagan era we have known that because the UK is bound so tightly (though I am glad that the bonds are loosening a little compared to the Thatcher-Major-Blair years) the type of US President that is elected affects many lives in the UK. If Al Gore had been properly appointed in 2000, hundreds of UK citizens would still be alive, not having died in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is that clear a correlation. Thus, the choice of American electors impacts heavily on us British and yet we have no control over the electoral process at all. Though we sometimes elect malicious or misguided people to be our prime minister, we do not elect morons in the way Americans do. Reagan and George W. Bush certainly seemed to lack the abilities necessary to fulfil the post they held and you could even question the capabilities of Jimmy Carter. Nixon was bright but oversaw a bitterly divided party and his obsession with power (similar in some ways to our own Tony Blair's) made his term of office infamous. Similarly Clinton let other obsessions, notably sex, get in the way of putting his abilities to full use.

It does seem rare that the US electorate, their opinions distorted through the electoral college system (though even with direct voting Bush would have made a clean sweep in 2004 there is no denying that), actually pick a candidate by their policies, they pick the person (up until now always a man) that appeals to them, and in fact often who resembles them. This might seem the ultimate form of democracy, but for electing someone to the most powerful position (debatably now the second most powerful after the Chairman of the People's Republic of China given China's rapid economic growth [including recent financial support to leading Western banks], the size of its armed forces and a population 5 times larger than the USA) in the world it is not about class but have the personal capabilities to fulfil the role. A rich man can be stupid; a poor man can be intelligent. US voters tend to vote for stupid, rich men.

Now among the potential candidates for the US presidential election there are ones who are very different to what we have seen ever since the USA was founded. On the Democrat side, Barack Obama who won the primary in Iowa (apparently the fourth 'most white' state in the USA) is the first black candidate (and to people in the UK his skin tone looks incredibly pale for a 'black' person as we define them, but I accept he is racially in the US category of African-American, though he is mixed-race) since Jesse Jackson and also a woman Hillary Clinton. Now, Clinton despite her gender actually fits the recent (last 50 years) mode of candidates in that she comes from a presidential dynasty (like the Roosevelts, Kennedys (effectively I know none of them was elected after John) and the Bushes) and is well-off and less commonly, though not uniquely is intelligent. She and Obama are neck-and-neck for New Hampshire. Ultimately I doubt it matters which of the two of them wins as Obama has now established himself strongly enough and Clinton is holding on well enough that either would have to consider the other as their vice-presidential candidate. Could it really be that by 2009 we have a black man and a woman as President/Vice-President or Vice-President/President? Possibly.

I doubt a Democrat victory because the USA is currently running in a very Republican direction. Bush picked up an additional 3 million votes in 2004 over his 2000 victory. The New Right has continued to be successful in scaring the US population into backing harsh measures against the continued supposed threat of al-Qaeda and in turn to try to wriggle out of any limits on US industry implied by climate change legislation. Attitudes counter to this are currently not popular in the USA. However, as I say the US electorate will often look past any policies to elect the person they like. No-one seems to have noticed that Reagan made a 180° turn between his first and second terms of office from condemning the USSR as the 'evil empire' to meeting with its leader. Whatever he said, however, contradictory it was, was accepted because Americans liked Ronnie (and the rest of the world was terrified of him). I watched '1983 - Brink of Armageddon' last night and it revealed how close nuclear war came on 10th November 1983 and it seems to vindicate that unilateral disarmanent would have reduced global tensions, let alone multilateral disarmanent, and that Reagan's posturing was actually endangering world stability in the way many of us warned).

The difference may be that Obama is mobilising people who are generally politically inactive or non-committed and he may be able to get enough of these to tip the balance against the Republicans in some states. However, given the entrenchment of the New Right and just general Republicans throughout the US system I imagine that if he comes close they will pull off some electoral shenanigans as we saw in 2000 (and we witnessed in the UK in 1992 especially in South-West England). In addition, I think since the moment when Obama won the Iowa primary he became the top candidate for assassination in the USA. The closer he comes to even being a presidential or vice-presidential candidate the more risk he will be under, just remember the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 and he probably stood less chance of winning the candidature than Obama does at this moment. Of course many on the extreme right-wing of US politics have opted out of the political system and are preferring to run around in militia rather than at hustings and I just hope the secret service can defend Obama.

So, does Obama's success mark a shift in the USA? To some degree, no. Despite his background Obama draws on solid roots. He combines the rhetoric of the chapel with the tones of the civil rights movement (which in fact can easily translate into civil rights for the poor as well as the black). Christianity is always a good thing to have on your side in US politics and drawing on the words of the great and good of history is always a good idea too (though sensibly Obama has quoted Martin Luther King sparingly). It seems that his emphasis that freedom is not immoral but actually stems for a decent morality, appeals to usually apolitical people who are beginning to chafe against the restrictions imposed by the perceived threat of terrorism but are in fact more about increasing authoritarian control in line with New Right ideas and about nice wars overseas to control raw materials and provide business opportunities for the President's friends rather than freeing oppressed people. So to some degree people are waking up to the fact that a smiling face does not make their lives better, it is actual policies aimed at the broad sweep of US society rather than a narrow elite. As Bush admitted himself in October 2000 where addressing a dinner costing $800 (£400; €556 at today's rather than 2000 exchange rates) per plate: "This is an impressive crowd - the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elites; I call you my base." How can even the middle class vote for a man with such a focus. So maybe we are seeing a changing approach to US politics which can only be for the good for both the average person in the USA and hopefully for the rest of the world. Though, of course policies can be brilliant for US people and damage the rest of the world, the two do not have to correlate, look at cheap fuel in the USA for example. In addition, if Obama does get to be President he might have to be even tougher than another candidate would have been, as given the prevailing hysteria is under attack from a SPECTRE-like organisation named (by the Americans themselves) al-Qaeda, this would be to prove that he is not 'soft' on terrorism an accusation which people will lay against him because of his race and political background.

A victory for Obama or Clinton as president, however unlikely would mark a step forward, showing that actually people from different backgrounds can progress to the highest level. The Bush governments seem to have suggest by their very personalities that only the elites can aspire to such a role. Neither Obama or Clinton are from even lower middle class backgrounds, but they are not white men from rich families which was beginning to seem the only criteria for becoming president. As I have noted before, the level to which a person can rise in a society reverberates through that society and with a black or female president many blacks and women can aspire to more realistically to become manager of their factory or store or wherever. That is the role of symbolism, but also moving to policies which will improve US society which is really decaying and a foreign policy which does not wreak death and destruction wherever it touches would be great things for have not only for the USA and the West but also the broader world. Hopefully the US electorate can see that, though I doubt it and we may have to wait a few more decades yet.