Ground Realities
Obama . . . and all those faltering American presidents
AFTER the euphoria of the election, it is now time for Barack Obama to prepare to govern. For a man who has held no executive office, who has been a senator for only four years, Obama will need to climb a mountain. That is no hint, though, that he will falter, that he might stumble and, indeed, will not be able to live up to the high hopes he has aroused in all Americans.
The beauty of democracy is that people who reach high positions often grow in office. Theodore Roosevelt is one president you can cite off the top of your head.
Even Harry Truman, so manifestly unprepared to be president, went on to do a rather good job after Franklin Delano Roosevelt's death in April 1945. There was little of the charismatic in him; and he was a little known senator from Missouri when FDR chose him as his vice-president.
Once in the White House, Truman was ridiculed by many and by the time 1948 came round, the conviction had set in that New York governor Thomas Dewey would drum him out of the presidency. In the event, Truman caused one of the biggest electoral upsets in American history when he managed to beat Dewey, who had gone to bed on election night convinced that the next morning he would be president.
But, of course, Obama is a whole lot more cerebral than Truman. A man who has been editor of the Harvard Law Review is not to be trifled with. Then, too, there is the matter of his oratorical skills.
Add to that the discipline and the strategic planning that helped him smash the mighty Clinton machine into so many heart-breaking pieces. This is a man who ought to be a good president, despite that absence of experience.
You could even suggest that the absence of experience is sometimes a boon, for it means the candidate for high office comes with no baggage. And, yet, there is the record that Jimmy Carter has left behind. He was a fresh-faced former governor of Georgia when he beat Gerald Ford to the White House in 1976.
After the inauguration in January 1977, he and his wife walked from the Capitol to the White House. It was an early demonstration of the accessible presidency that Carter planned to have in place, after years of what men like Richard Nixon had done to promote an imperial presidency. But Carter then faltered.
A brilliant man, he nevertheless lost precious time going over the minutiae of administration. He stunned Americans, generally used to the inspirational coming from their presidents, when he spoke of a malaise afflicting the country. And then Iran came in, determined to humiliate him.
Edward Kennedy mounted a doomed campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980, leaving the Carter presidency doomed in the process. Ronald Reagan then walked all over him.
So these gleaming instances of good, intelligent presidents eventually collapsing in failure are aplenty in America. By any measure, Richard Nixon should have made a great president. He understood geopolitics, knew which way the winds of the future would blow, and he went to China in February 1972. That was when history was made.
With the Soviet Union, he set détente in motion. Given a second term, he was clearly headed for greater things. But then came Watergate -- and all the good that Nixon had done in the White House suddenly did not seem to matter any more.
It is amazing that a president as potently intellectual as Nixon should have committed the monstrosity of a scandal that would bring him down. With Carter and Bill Clinton, he was looked upon as one of the three most brilliant presidents of the United States in the twentieth century.
The brilliance, though, came to be lost in unseemly banalities that bore the dark footmarks of Richard Nixon. And when you think of his predecessor Lyndon Johnson, you remember that in the senate LBJ had been a masterful legislator. As president, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, he made sure that civil rights for America's blacks was ensured. He devised and implemented his Great Society programs.
But all of that was to no avail. Vietnam ruined him, not least because Johnson had in 1964 influenced the senate into passing the Tonkin Resolution, on the basis of a lie, thereby increasing the president's powers to wage war.
It remains an irony that having castigated Barry Goldwater as a warmonger at the 1964 election, Johnson went on to wage a vicious war in Vietnam against the communist Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. It was a war that would destroy his presidency.
Barack Obama surely understands all these truths of history. And because he does, he should be able to give his presidency a transformative character, something that was expected of John Kennedy once he had defeated Richard Nixon at the presidential election of 1960.
Kennedy was young and vibrant, had a glamorous wife and offered Americans shining hope after the tedium of the Eisenhower years. But he soon proved that expectations often do not match realities. He went to see Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna and was shaken by the patent condescension of the Soviet leader toward him. His administration committed a fiasco over the Bay of Pigs.
In broad measure, the idealism that Kennedy embodied before his election to the White House did not translate into presidential action on the ground. He was in no way a cerebral man, which is why the history of his presidency, for all the eulogies showered on him by his fans, has been one of empty space where ideas should have been.
When you reflect on Ronald Reagan, you recall the sunny optimism he personified after the gloom of the Carter years. But it was vacuous optimism, seeing that Reagan had little to offer in terms of policy depth and substance. He bombed the Gulf of Sidra to punish Muammar Gaddafi; and he sent troops into Grenada.
In the end, for all its seeming vitality, the Reagan presidency was a waste, a point where the United States commenced its lurch to the conservative right. In time, Newt Gingrich and then George W. Bush would complete the disturbing journey. Good men like Al Gore and John Kerry would fall by the wayside.
With all his sense of history, Obama should be treading the path carefully. As one of the most unprepared of presidents in modern times, he knows he will be under intense scrutiny. Americans will expect him to turn the economy around, a job that Bill Clinton did marvelously well in his time.
Abroad, most people are powered by the idea of Barack Obama turning the world into a planet of happiness. That expectation will turn out to have been hollow, for the simple reason that presidents of the United States have never diverged from the foreign policy so carefully crafted at the end of the Second World War.
Obama has already sent panic into the hearts of Pakistanis with his tough talk about the Taliban and al-Qaeda. And he has been making loud noises about what Iran must do to make Washington happy. Like any other American running for high office -- and attaining it -- Obama has informed Israel that his administration will stand firm in its defence. The point?
It is a pretty simple one: do not expect the first African-American president in United States history to stray from the set pattern of foreign policy. The last time a president tried doing things differently, he was destroyed. Remember Carter's human rights-based foreign policy?
That said, it is still hope that Obama instills in people everywhere. He needs to rebuild what Bush-Cheney have so cheerfully destroyed in these past eight years. That America is a place where the content of character and not the colour of skin, as Martin Luther King, Jr. would say, is the cornerstone of life has been proved through Obama's triumph. The new president must now convince the rest of the world that, for America, there is life after the Bushmen, that there is in it that capacity for the renewal men call idealism.
Barack Obama need not be a shooting star.
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