The Obama era
Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now lives in Jamaica. This is the23rd in his new serieson the Obama era.
“Another Democrat, Lisa Fleming, 49, who is white, said that even in the small Illinois town, Potomac, where she lived, she noticed ‘people of different races being kinder to each other’ since Mr. Obama’s election. In Kansas City, a white Republican homemaker, Mary Robertson, 78, said Mr. Obama’s ‘openness and acceptance have helped others be more open and accepting.”
(‘Obama Is Nudging Views on Race, a Survey Finds’ NYT, April 28)
When Barack Obama was inaugurated President of the US, his staffers immediately began downplaying the significance of the first 100 days, an artificial litmus test already being hyped in anticipation by the US media. By last week, however, they were happy to hype it themselves: Obama had passed that milestone with flying colours, and his popularity at home and abroad had, if anything, grown since January 20. An amazing 80 per cent of Americans, regardless of party affiliation, last week said they liked Barack Obama.
There remain, of course, the Armageddon prophecies and Obama-loathings issuing from the leadership of a Republic Party now shrunken to a lunatic fringe: a party, as several commentators dared surmise last week in the wake of Arlen Specter’s defection, arguably at risk of following the 19th century Whig Party into extinction. But bar them, media assessments of Obama’s first 100 days were overwhelmingly positive.
The NYT declared that Obama had made “a strong start at addressing many of the most… critical failed policies and urgent threats bequeathed to him by former President George W. Bush.”
Newsweek’s Fareed Zacharia, noting that “no other American president in modern memory has faced a learning curve as steep as the one Barack Obama has encountered,” and citing his “extraordinary set of challenges,” nonetheless concluded that “so far, any president would be envious of [his] accomplishments.”
Writing in The New Yorker, George Packer referred to “the elusive nature” and “formidable appeal” of “Obamaism,” contrasting these with the disastrous descent of American conservatism into a creed that’s “abstract, hard-edged, and indifferent to experience,” and, even worse, “paranoid.”
(Packer couldn’t resist citing the infamous Michele Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota, who last year called for the media to investigate “anti-American” members of Congress, and who last week declared soulfully: “Where freedom is tried, the people rejoice. But where tyranny is enforced upon the people, as Barack Obama is doing, the people suffer and mourn.” Packer also noted contemptuously that, “Fox News’s Glenn Beck, who had earlier equated Obamaism with socialism and Communism, [has] revised his analysis: ‘They’re marching us toward 1984… Like it or not, fascism is on the rise.’ Footage of goose-stepping Nazis played across the screen behind him.”)
The NYT’s Timothy Egan observed that Obama was “making it safe to be a liberal again.” Noting that, according to last year’s polls, only 20 per cent of voters identified themselves as liberal, while 36 per cent said they were moderate and 38 per cent declared themselves conservative, Egan mused that “given that makeup, the public might be expected to look harshly at a president who has all but nationalized the auto and banking industries, run up the national debt and shaken hands with a foreign leader reviled as a nuisance at best. But there he is: with 68 percent job approval rating in the New York Times poll. This from an electorate with nearly half the voters saying Obama is more to the left than they are.”
And Egan marvelled (as this columnist has done) that although 60 per cent of Americans view Obama as “very or somewhat liberal,” yet, “with a shrug and a thumbs up, they’re cheering for the new guy.”
How come?
Part of the reason, no doubt, is the litany of political ship-rightings and policy initiatives, too well known to be repeated here, which this seemingly tireless young President has embarked on in the wake of GW Bush’s catastrophic presidency. But this columnist would argue that, overriding these, are two aspects of Obama that have been insufficiently recognized by US commentators.
The first is the soul-deep relief of most Americans at no longer having a fool and a knave in the White House. In October last year, asked to choose one word which best described then-candidate Obama, a plurality of respondents said “Inexperienced.” Yet, a mere five months later, the same question elicited “Intelligent.” For that alone, for the blessed escape from shame that that conclusion has brought them, most Americans, one suspects, would be willing to carry Obama the length of the Mall on their shoulders, cheering.
Moreover, there’s an even greater (and even less remarked) reason. It is that America has changed demographically; that it’s no longer the precinct of rich old white men but a teeming multiracial, multicultural and young society; and Obama, multiracial, multicultural and young, is the very type or figurehead of this new America.
Let the reader recall that, even though on November 4 Obama won a bigger share of the white vote than any Democratic President since Lyndon Johnson, McCain would have won the presidency handsomely if whites alone had been eligible to vote. It was the black, Latino and Asian votes that turned the tables so emphatically in Obama’s favour.
And while the minority of white voters supporting Obama was impressively higher than history would have led one to expect, even today it’s the minorities who have been skewing the polls in the new President’s favour. Only 34 per cent of whites, eg, say the US is now headed in the right direction, compared to 70 per cent of blacks. Obama’s 68 per cent job approval rating last week was higher than any president since Kennedy at the 100-day mark. But it would be lower than any president since Kennedy without the emphatic thumbs-up given him by the minorities.
The same is true of his popularity abroad. Few Caribbean observers, eg, could have watched Obama mingling with the leaders at the recent Summit of the Americas (including, yes, his joshing exchanges with Venezuela’s Chávez) without realizing that, in a sense that would be difficult for a white American journalist to recognize, he was among his own people.
And that, this columnist suggests, is ultimately the secret of his success. In pre-verbal but defining ways, Obama is one of us. Whether in the US or abroad, his people are our people; and both they and we know it.
