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BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA
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Obama’s overblown media image has blurred the perceptions of the proverbial common man. In spite of the fact that most facts of his life are known to the public, it is difficult to understand him as a political leader and to say definitely, at this starting point of his Presidency, what kind of President he would make. He has been compared to Lincoln, Roosevelt and J.F. Kennedy, but these comparisons appear invidious because all of them were white Americans; nor can his realization of the American Dream be called a rag to riches story. To a perceptive observer, he would look like a mulatto character from Faulkner’s novels who suddenly has woken up into the twenty–first century multicultural America and remembers no nightmares of the reality of his 18th or 19th century past of racial discrimination and historic humiliation.
He is the first African-American to hold the office of the President of the United States. He, more than anything else, re-presents the mixed, educated, immigrant middle-class of the present-day USA.
Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. He worked as a community organizer, and practiced as a civil rights attorney in Chicago before serving three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. He also taught Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He was defeated in the US Congress elections 2000, but got elected to the Senate in November 2004. In July 2004.
As a Democratic minority member in the 109th Congress he helped make legislation to control conventional weapons and for greater public accountability in federal funds spending. He also made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. During the 110th Congress he contributed to legislation on lobbying and electoral fraud, climate change, nuclear terrorism, care for US military personnel returning from combat assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Thus, he is not entirely the creation of the media. Had he been purely white, instead of half-white half-black as he is, his rise would not have attracted such exaggerated media attention. How long the honey- moon with the media will last is hard to say. He faces the enormous task of putting the derailed economy on course and sustaining the vast but doubtful military involvements of USA abroad, especially in Asia. As President, he will also have to rework political, economic and diplomatic equations with almost every important country of the world.
The spell of relief from the outgoing toxic Bush administration will be over soon The obvious historical significance of an African-American taking over as President of the United States, “a polity substantially founded on the genocide of one race and the slave labour of another”, will also soon start glowering at all Americans—implications will be global.
Obama’s sudden rise, no doubt, is the outcome of racial politics. He has certainly benefited from the legacy of the civil rights and black liberation movements of the 1960s, led by Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X, both of whom got assassinated. So many others died in these movements. These events have left a great impact on American society and transformed large segments of its people. That social transformation is believed to have been responsible for making 66 per cent of those between the age of 18 and 29, and 52 per cent of those in the 30-44 age group vote for Mr Obama. Surprisingly, he is neither a product of that legacy nor one to associate with its militant ideological stance. Yet, he is its absolute beneficiary.
Obama’s middle Muslim name created some early troubles but repeated assertions of his deep Christian faith finally overcame the public doubts. He strictly prohibited his campaign staff from wearing any visibly Islamic gear, both in public or on television. He made it a point to visit churches and synagogues but never a mosque, ignoring the unsolicited counsel of important newspapers like The New York Times and International Herald Tribune.
His foreign policy postures also reflected a similar stance. Obama criticized the UN for permitting the Iranian President Ahmadinejad to address the UN General Assembly even when US national agencies confirmed that Iran has no nuclear weapons program. He has reiterated quite a few times his intention to use all American power, including military force, to stop Iran’s nuclear program. Almost in Bush-like tones, he has expressed his unwavering commitment to escalate the war in Afghanistan and widening the scope of US bombing in northwestern Pakistan, with or without the consent of the Pakistanis. To that extent, he has indicated continuity of Bush administration’s military unilateralism.
His pursuit of support from Israel and the Israeli lobby in the US has been persistent. Uri Avnery, the veteran Israeli writer and peace activist, described Mr Obama’s appearance at the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as one that “broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning”. He stopped former President Jimmy Carter from speaking at the Democratic Party Convention for fear of a backlash from the Israeli lobby; this was described as “a cynical kind of pragmatism”.
Mr Obama’s stirring populist rhetoric during the campaign and use of words like “Change” and “Hope” and undulating chant, “Yes, We can”, boosted a demoralized nation and supercharged its younger people.
He made broad promises to rebuild a crestfallen nation—its infrastructure, its education and health systems and to revamp its tax structure to favour families earning less than $250,000 a year. He forged a cross-racial coalition of the young, the poor and the unemployed, as also the middle classes imparting to his campaign—a progressive veneer in a nation soaked in neo-liberalism. So the Right Wing labelled him as a “socialist” but to no effect. For Obama, winning the elections proved easier than subduing Hillary Clinton. The financial meltdown too came just at the right moment to turn the tables on John McCain.
Obama’s campaign raised far more money than any other US pre-sidential candidate in history, not all from small donors, contrary to his campaigners’ claim. Fewer than 2,600 contributors to Mr McCain campaign fund were “chief executives”, nearly 6,000 of Mr Obama’s contributors were listed as chief executive officers. Washington lobbyists and lawyers, the communication industry and the electronics industry, healthcare-related private interests, nuclear and pharmaceutical industries and all kinds of big business made huge contributions. Lobbyists alone gave $37 million. Will they and other big donors not be rewarded?
His previous record in politics shows that he made a speech opposing the impending Iraq war in 2002, before he came even into the Illinois Senate but he voted in favour of every war appropriation bill during the Bush administration. He edited the Harvard Law Review, taught law at Chicago University, and was a civil rights lawyer before coming into politics, but as a Senator he, without compunction, voted for the Patriot Act 2, notorious for extreme curtailment of civil liberties in recent US history. He, along with Mr McCain, voted in favour of the bailout plan that gifts hundreds of billions of dollars to the very financial institutions who caused the infamous meltdown. As President-elect he urged the Bush administration to bail out General Motors as well.
Mr Obama has been advocating a military policy that is incompatible with the investments he has proposed to re-build America’s failing physical and social infrastructure. Thus, somewhere there is a quirk in his leadership—projected as pacifist and progressive.
Finally, we have to consider the Indo-US relationship under Mr Obama? The basics of the new Indo-US equation were formulated under Mr Clinton and not under Mr Bush. A far-reaching military alliance for the Indian Ocean and beyond; the US-Israel-India axis for West Asia; the nuclear trade are likely to be pursued by Obama, though without flair. There could be some pressure to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) but that will not endanger nuclear trade.
Obama represents a declining West and America. For an assurance of his doubtfully great presidency, he can only look backward to the USA’s past glory. America is a futurist nation, but if Obama looks forward, he will only see an Asia Rising—not a very comfortable thought even for an African-American President of the USA!
