UNITED STATES: After a roller-coaster 2010, the US president remains more popular than his policies
“CHANGE WE can believe in” had been his presidential campaign slogan. Americans got plenty of change in 2010, but much of it seemed messy, superficial and out of control – hardly the change they bargained for when they voted for Barack Obama.
Perhaps the biggest surprise was the rise of the populist Tea Party, which energised the right and took more than a third of the 63 House seats that fell to Republicans in the midterm elections on November 2nd. The Tea Party had emerged in 2009 as a visceral reaction against the stimulus and health care plans — and doubtless a response to the election of the country’s first African American president. No one foresaw how much it would change US politics.
Republicans portrayed Obama’s achievements as ideologically-motivated assaults by big government on freedom. The far right continued to propagate myths that Obama was born in Kenya and that he was a Muslim. Republicans failed to see the contradictions at the heart of their discourse: demanding both tax cuts and an end to deficit spending; proclaiming the exceptional character of America while bemoaning its decline.
The election of the Republican Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat on January 19th, with Tea Party support, was a harbinger of the year to come. With Kennedy’s seat, the Democrats lost their 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority, making it impossible for the Senate to legislate without Republican support.
Against the odds, the 111th Congress achieved a great deal: the healthcare Bill, which Obama signed on March 23rd; the financial reform Bill, signed on July 21st; the repeal of discrimination against gays in the military, voted by the Senate on December 18th. And the Senate was expected to ratify the New Start arms control treaty with Russia before the holiday recess.
The healthcare Bill, which will make medical insurance available to 32 million previously uninsured Americans, was the high point of Obama’s year.
“This is what change looks like,” he rejoiced on the night the House passed the Bill without a single Republican vote. “We did not avoid our responsibility: we embraced it. We did not fear our future: we shaped it.” But as the year wore on, it was precisely that sense of “shaping the future” that was lacking. On December 14th, a federal judge declared unconstitutional the requirement that all Americans obtain medical insurance, starting what is likely to be lengthy legal wrangling over Obama’s signature achievement.
On April 20th, BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and began spewing some five million barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. Obama was criticised for the slow and ineffectual response to the biggest ecological disaster in US history, but also for failing to show anger and other emotions. Though he visited the Gulf repeatedly and forced BP executives to establish a $20 billion fund for victims, Obama found it difficult to shake allegations that the oil spill was his equivalent of George W Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina.
Obama fared hardly better in foreign policy. The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, embarrassed the administration with enormous dumps of US government documents: 92,000 on the Afghan war in July; nearly 400,000 reports from Iraq in October; and 250,000 diplomatic cables at the end of November. The violations of government secrecy reinforced the impression of a vulnerable America whose house was not in order.
On August 31st, Obama announced that he had met his deadline to end the US combat mission in Iraq. Despite the presence of 50,000 US troops, Iraq remains a violent and unstable country where it took Iraqi leaders more than nine months to form a government.
Nearly 6,000 US troops have now died in Iraq and Afghanistan. The modest success in Iraq was dwarfed by US difficulties in Afghanistan, the longest war in US history. In June, Obama was forced to sack General Stanley McChrystal, his commander in Afghanistan, after McChrystal criticised his civilian masters in an interview. Sixty per cent of Americans now say the Afghan war has not been worth fighting, even as the administration goes ahead with plans to stay at least four more years. The review of the war this month offered no easy answers to Afghan government corruption and Pakistan’s failure to prevent the Taliban and al-Qaeda taking refuge on their side of the border.
In September, Obama told the United Nations General Assembly that he believed a Palestinian state was possible within a year. But peace talks broke down when Israel resumed building settlements in the West Bank after a partial, 10-month freeze.
The White House aborted a deal whereby, in exchange for a 90-day stoppage in construction, Washington would have given Israel $3 billion worth of jet fighters, a commitment to veto any resolutions criticising Israel at the UN, and a promise never to ask for another settlement freeze. The “peace process” appeared to have reached a dead end.
Against this backdrop, the Democrats suffered in November what Obama called a “shellacking” – their greatest defeat since 1938 – with the loss of 63 House seats and six in the Senate. Nearly two thirds of voters said the economy was the most important issue to them. Officially, the recession ended in June, but so far it is a jobless recovery, with unemployment rising to 9.8 per cent in November.
The Republican Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said his party’s top priority was to prevent Obama’s re-election in 2012. It was McConnell who negotiated a deal for tax cuts with Obama, announced on December 6th.
The President’s Democratic supporters had long viewed him as Gulliver, tied down by obstructionist Republican Lilliputians. But Obama’s acceptance of $700 billion in tax cuts for the richest Americans – in violation of a key campaign promise – looked like weakness and betrayal.
The House Democratic caucus mutinied, initially refusing to support the compromise bill. Then, something strange happened. Polls showed that close to two-thirds of Americans approved of the tax cut deal. While Democrats criticised what they saw as Obama’s capitulation, the man in the street wanted a leader who knew how to compromise.
In the last days of the lame-duck session, the outgoing Congress completed an extraordinary volume of business. The signing into law a repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy helped liberal Democrats swallow the bitter pill of tax cuts for the rich and the Senate’s passage of New Start meant the Obama family could enjoy their holidays in Hawaii. The President seemed to have snatched victory from the jaws of his midterm defeat.
The happy ending to Obama’s roller-coaster year was likely to be little more than a reprieve, however. Part two of the Obama presidency will begin in earnest on January 5th, when the Republicans take over the House. The Tea Partiers are sure to make their presence felt in the 112th Congress.
Two former Obama priorities – immigration reform and climate change – are dead in the water. America is waiting to see whether, as the civil rights activist RevAl Sharpton predicted in reference to the tax cut deal, “The Republicans will eat [Obama] for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”
Two years after his election, Obama remains more popular than his policies, with a 45 per cent job-approval rating. The conventional wisdom says he will win re-election if unemployment falls below 9 per cent and if the Republicans cannot find a more credible challenger than Sarah Palin.