Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now lives in Jamaica. This is the fourth in his new series on the Obama era.
It was probably the exchange that sealed the election. Lehman Brothers had abruptly gone under, and US Treasury Secretary Paulson had just demanded $700 billion, no strings attached, to bailout a financial system in imminent danger of collapse, when John McCain dramatically announced he was suspending his campaign and postponing his upcoming debate with Obama to rush back to Washington to save America. McCain ended by inviting his Democratic opponent to do likewise.
Obama demurred. An American president, he remarked, often had to deal with several crises at once, and he saw no reason why he couldn’t both continue his campaign and intervene where useful in the financial situation. When McCain’s ‘white knight’ gambit turned out to be mere bluster, middle America moved decisively behind Obama.
Last week, the President-elect got a real-life taste of what he meant.
The transition had already not been going as the Obama team envisaged it. For starters, Obama’s Chicago meeting with Hillary Clinton had triggered a happily-startled frenzy of ‘leaks’ by the Clinton people, designed to force Obama to nominate their gal for Secretary of State, after all (this, to such an extent that the epochal wonder of Obama’s election all but disappeared for a spell in the old, It’s-all-about-me! Clinton excitement). And more importantly, the palpable uncaring coming from the White House as the financial crisis deepened was driving the markets down and down.
(When the crisis broke, Bush contented himself with popping out —“like a cuckoo clock,” accused MSNBC’s Chris Matthews — to offer a couple of two-minute statements from the White House lawn before scurrying back inside. The rest he left to Secretary Paulson.)
Thus, within a couple weeks of November 4, Obama had had to abandon both his plan for an orderly announcement of his cabinet and his hope for a transition period in which he might prepare for governing in peace. Try as he might to defend the latter by insisting the US only had one president at a time, it soon became clear to Obama that he had either to step into the yawning vacuum at the top or stand by and watch Wall Street and the US economy, rudderless, deteriorate catastrophically in the 60-odd days remaining to his inauguration.
So Obama brought forward his announcement of his economic team. For four consecutive working days, ending Wednesday, he held press conferences, the real purpose of which was simply to reassure the American people that responsible leadership was on the way.
Surprisingly, it seemed to work. The markets rallied to their biggest two-day gain in 21 years, and even as the economic news continued to be alarming, with the fate of the big three US automakers, the very heart of American manufacturing, hanging in the balance, a curious, irrational happiness seemed to spread through much of the citizenry. Polls showed that fully 67 per cent of Americans believed Obama would succeed in turning the US economy around in his first term. Anecdotally, Thursday’s Thanksgiving appears to have been the most heartfelt in decades.
(This background happiness ought not to be overlooked. The monumental shrug with which most — not all, of course — Americans, black and white, freed themselves from the prison of their racist history on November 4 — so that, nearly a month later, white Americans are still engaging African-Americans in conversation on the street, for no other reason than the pure release of feeling they’ve finally earned the right to do so — is of course a very large part of it. So is relief at the prospect of the return of intelligence, decency and the rule of law to an America that had been sent reeling into brutishness by eight years of Bush-Cheney. And what that happiness suggests is that, contrary to the warnings of the cognoscenti that Obama’s ‘honeymoon’ is likely to be short-lived, America’s first African-American president may well enjoy the abiding support of an electorate only too aware of the degradation from which he and they, together acted to rescue their country.
That relief, and that support, are likely to set the civic tone of America for years to come, and given the manifold, daunting challenges facing Obama, he may need them.)
Still, Obama’s situation remains as precarious as it’s odd. America’s disgust with GW Bush is so great that it’s long pretended he’s no longer President; but he is. And while the ol’ GWB appears to be spending his remaining time in office alternating between twiddling his thumbs, ramming through some last-minute benefits for the folks in whose name he has always governed (oil-drilling in wild-life preserves, eg), and trying to protect himself and members of his administration from being prosecuted, at some point in the future, for war crimes and crimes against humanity, the fact is, he remains President for fully 50 more days. How can Obama, from the wings, go on cheerleading Americans’ spirits for so long?
Besides, the President-elect had just taken possession of America’s financial and economic crises when the terrorists’ attacks in Mumbai fell like a thunderclap on the ears of the world. Now Obama, having had to rush forth his economic team last week, has to do likewise this week with his national security team — and this, to repeat, while still constrained to the sidelines. One understands Tom Friedman’s wistful recommendation, in the NYT a week ago, that Congress should amend the US Constitution to advance Inauguration Day to Thanksgiving Day.
Two days after they erupted, the Mumbai attacks haven’t yet been completely quelled, but early reports suggest they were the work of Lashkar-e-Toiba, a militant Pakistani group dedicated to ending Indian rule in Kashmir. Of some 40 attackers, 29 are said to be from Pakistan and 11 from Bangladesh.
The really bad news is that Lashkar has operated in the past with help from elements of Pakistani Intelligence (the ISI). And indeed, in an extraordinary development not likely to find favour with Pakistan’s armed forces, the chief of the ISI is about to travel to India, reportedly at India’s demand, to “help with the investigation” of Mumbai.
If this sounds as though Islamabad is on the defensive, it should. Hindu India’s rage at the attacks is enormous; Indian elections are coming, and for both good civic and selfishly political reasons — viz, to try to deflect that rage both from India’s 155 million Muslims and from itself — the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is going to be sorely tempted to move against Islamabad with a series of reprisals in which miscalculation by either side could result in war.
At the very least, Mumbai suggests that the Pakistani government’s attention will for now be directed east and south, towards India, and away from the Taliban and al-Qaeda, currently threatening the US-backed Karzai government in Afghanistan from Pakistan’s western borderlands.
At the worst, Indian retributive pressure could result in a revolt either by or within the ISI, one that could conceivably topple the Zardari government and bring Pakistan one giant step closer to being a failed state — a failed state with nuclear weapons.
And this, too, is a crisis which, much sooner than he’d like, Obama may have to own.
