Six months ago, Barack Obama came to office with his plate overflowing: a stricken US economy, two wars, and ambitious (and politically expensive) plans to reform health care and move the US towards (clean) energy independence. The jury is still out on each of his policies re these.
The US economy appears to be over the hump, except that the financial villains who triggered the whole mess appear to have been rewarded rather than punished for their venality, and unemployment in the US continues to rise. Obama’s poll numbers have fallen steadily as a result.
In Iraq, the pullback of US troops to their bases has been accompanied by a new rise in sectarian violence, though not to 2007 levels. Iraq remains unstable, and it’s not a given that Obama will be able to honour his campaign pledge to withdraw US forces from Iraq by 2011.
In Afghanistan, US and NATO deaths have risen sharply, as Obama’s commitment of 20,000 more troops to that theatre has been met by an exponential rise in IEDs planted by the Taliban. Obama is not yet taking the kind of widespread domestic criticism for these greatly increased fatalities that’s been dragging down the poll numbers of British Prime Minister Brown. But it’s early days yet.
Obama’s health care reform plans are currently in danger of foundering, as powerful vested interests and their Republican voices in Congress join in chorus to assail his administration for wanting to ‘socialize’ medicine: a bogeyword still, apparently, to most Americans, who may prefer to go on being exorbitantly ripped off by pharmaceutical and insurance companies rather than permit their government to espouse ‘socialism.’
As for energy reform, Obama hasn’t had the breathing space so far seriously to tackle that.
Yet, despite these big and equivocal matters, it’s four unscheduled mini-crises that have dramatized the new president in people’s eyes. He came out of three with flying colours; failed one.
The first mini-crisis was the capture of an Ameri-can sea captain by Somali pirates. Obama gave the go-ahead for US Special Forces to ‘take out’ the pirates with small arms’ fire; a risky decision (he would surely have taken the blame if the captain had been killed), but one which made him seem ‘tough’ when the pirates were indeed taken out and the captain freed.
The second was the May 1 announcement by Justice David Souter, the left-of-centre Supreme Court justice, of his intended resignation. The news spurred Congressional Republicans, feeling their oats after GW Bush’s two right-wing appointees, and in full cry in their crusade to overthrow Roe versus Wade, to mount their battle steeds. Even before Obama began considering a replacement for Souter, Republicans gleefully declared their intention to block his eventual nominee. But Obama deftly dribbled past them, naming, in Sonia Sotomayor, a highly qualified Latina whom the Republicans couldn’t attack without hurting themselves badly with Latino voters, the US’s fastest growing demographic. The result has been that the promised Republican opposition to Obama’s eventual choice has shrunk from a bang to a whimper. Sotomayor’s confirmation process has proceeded without a hitch.
The third was the ridiculous arrest last month of black Harvard scholar, Professor Louis Gates Jr, in his own home by a white police officer. Obama opined that the officer had ‘acted stupidly’: a remark that, however justified it might seem to you and me, enraged US police forces (a surprisingly powerful ‘lobby’ in US domestic politics), and, in the eyes of many white Americans, threatened to strip Obama of his precious ‘post-racial’ aura. It’s not clear that Obama’s belated attempt to turn the incident into a ‘teachable moment,’ inviting both Gates and the officer to the White House for a beer, was enough to cool tempers on either side. Suddenly, the President appeared to lose a sizeable share of the white independent voters who helped put him in office. His poll numbers fell again.
Obama’s latest mini-crisis came last week, and involved the freeing of two American journalists imprisoned by North Korea and sentenced to 12 years’ hard labour for illegally crossing its border from China. It was a ‘rescue’ full of drama on the surface and covert negotiations beneath it.
The first sign that a deal might be in the making (and that Kim Jong Il might be given most of what he wanted) came about two weeks ago, when the two women journalists apologized for having crossed the North Korean border. Soon afterwards, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton began moderating comments she’d made comparing North Korea’s nuclear test and missile launchings to the behaviour of an attention-seeking teenager. (In response to those comments, the North Korean Foreign Ministry called Mrs Clinton “a funny lady” who looked at times “like a primary-school girl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping.”)
The heavy lifting was evidently done in New York, between the two countries’ UN teams, and by the time Bill Clinton galvanized the media last Tuesday by flying (on a private jet) to Pyongyang, the deal had been done. Kim Jong Il got what he most wanted, a photo op with an American president. Bill Clinton got visibility for the first time in the Obama era (‘Bill Clinton: The Comeback Cat,’ the Huffington Post called him). Obama got a fillip to his stature as the generalissimo orchestrating things behind the scenes. The two journalists got to go home.
Amusingly, the White House went to great pains beforehand to forswear any involvement in the release effort — this, in an apparent effort to ward off rightwing charges about the Obama administration ‘negotiating with terrorists’ —only to claim its fair due of credit once the journalists were safely home. Whereupon the charges came thick and fast.
As a wri-ter for the right-wing Weekly Standard scolded: “[White House Press Secretary] Robert Gibbs put out a statement this morning saying that President Clinton was there on a solely private mission. That is false… This is legitimacy [for Kim Jong Il]. This is a lifeline to a regime that is a terrorist regime, that has proliferated nuclear technology to a terror-sponsoring state [Syria]. And there Bill Clinton is, in effect, begging to get these journalists back.”
Others raged at Al Gore for sending his journalists into danger and then compromising US power by his efforts to get them freed. There were even voices chiding the young women for having embarrassed the US, when they could have kept their mouths shut and taken their 12-year sentences like, well, a man. One recalls the 2001 forced landing of a US spy plane in China, when similar voices denounced the crew for not preserving US technological secrets by crashing into the sea (and dying). Made of stern stuff are these Republican hawks!
And so, there was President Obama, next day, giving a press conference to warn North Korea that the journalists’ drama had changed nothing, and that sticks rather than carrots would be its lot if it didn’t quit its nuclear programme and return, without pre-conditions, to the Six-Party talks.
Which, as he must know, isn’t going to happen.
North Korea got lucky and found itself with hostages; the Obama administration duly ransomed them; most Americans are relieved the girls are safely home; and that’s all.
