[THS] Alexander Cockburn: The Fall of Obama

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

The Fall of Obama

By Alexander Cockburn

http://www.counterpunch.org/

The man who seized the White House by fomenting a mood of irrational expectation
is now facing the bitter price exacted by reality. The reality is that there can be no
"good" American president. It's an impossible hand to play. Obama is close to being
finished.

The nation's first black president promised change at the precise moment when no
single man, even if endowed with the communicative powers of Franklin Roosevelt,
the politic mastery of Lyndon Johnson, the brazen agility of Bill Clinton, could turn the
tide that has been carrying America to disaster for 30 years.

This summer many Americans are frightened. Over 100,000 of them file for
bankruptcy every month. Three million homeowners face foreclosure this year. Add
them to the 2.8 million who were foreclosed in 2009, Obama's first year in office.
Nearly seven million have been without jobs in the last year for six months or longer.
By the time you tot up the people who have given up looking for work and the
people on part-time, the total is heading toward 20 million.

Fearful people are irrational. So are racists. Obama is the target of insane charges. A
hefty percentage of Americans believe that he is a socialist – a charge as ludicrous as
accusing the Archbishop of Canterbury of being a closet Druid. Obama reveres the
capitalist system. He admires the apex predators of Wall Street who showered his
campaign treasury with millions of dollars. The frightful catastrophe in the Gulf of
Mexico stemmed directly from the green light he and his Secretary of the Interior,
Ken Salazar, gave to BP.

It is not Obama's fault that for 30 years America's policy – under Reagan, both
Bushes and Bill Clinton – has been to export jobs permanently to the Third World.
The jobs that Americans now desperately seek are no longer here, in the homeland,
and never will be. They're in China, Taiwan, Vietnam, India, Indonesia.

No stimulus program, giving money to cement contractors to fix potholes along the
federal interstate highway system, is going to bring those jobs back. Highly trained
tool and die workers, the aristocrats of the manufacturing sector, are flipping
hamburgers – at best – for $7.50 an hour because U.S. corporations sent their jobs
to Guangzhou, with the approval of politicians flush with the money of the "free
trade" lobby.

It is not Obama's fault that across 30 years more and more money has floated up to
the apex of the social pyramid till America is heading back to where it was in the
1880s, a nation of tramps and millionaires. It's not his fault that every tax break,
every regulation, every judicial decision tilts toward business and the rich. That was
the neoliberal America conjured into malign vitality back in the mid 1970s.

But it is Obama's fault that he did not understand this, that always, from the getgo,
he flattered Americans with paeans to their greatness, without adequate warning of
the political and corporate corruption destroying America and the resistance he would
face if he really fought against the prevailing arrangements that were destroying
America.  He offered them a free and easy pass to a better future, and now they see
that the promise was empty.

It's Obama's fault, too, that, as a communicator, he cannot rally and inspire the
nation from its fears. From his earliest years he has schooled himself not to be
excitable, not to be an angry black man who would be alarming to his white friends
at Harvard and his later corporate patrons. Self-control was his passport to the
guardians of the system, who were desperate to find a symbolic leader to restore
America's credibility in the world after the disasters of the Bush era. He is too cool.

So, now Americans in increasing numbers have lost confidence in him. For the first
time in the polls negative assessments outnumber the positive. He no longer
commands trust. His support is drifting down to 40 per cent. The straddle that
allowed him to flatter corporate chieftains at the same time as blue-collar workers
now seems like the most vapid opportunism. The casual campaign pledge to wipe out
al-Quaida in Afghanistan is now being cashed out in a disastrous campaign viewed
with dismay by a majority of Americans.

The polls portend disaster. It now looks as though the Republicans may well
recapture not only the House but, conceivably, the Senate as well. The public mood
is so contrarian that, even though polls show that voters think the Democrats may
well have better solutions on the economy than Republicans, they will vote against
incumbent Democrats in the midterm elections next fall. They just want to throw the
bums out.

Obama has sought out Bill Clinton to advise him in this desperate hour. If Clinton is
frank, he will remind Obama that his own hopes for a progressive first term were
destroyed by the failure of his health reform in the spring of 1993. By August of that
year, he was importing a Republican, David Gergen, to run the White House.

Obama had his window of opportunity last year, when he could have made jobs and
financial reform his prime objectives. That's what Americans hoped for. Mesmerized
by economic advisers who were creatures of the banks, he instead plunged into the
Sargasso Sea of "health reform," wasted the better part of a year, and ended up
with something that pleases no one.

What can save Obama now? It's hard even to identify a straw he can grasp at. It's
awfully early in the game to say it, but, as Marlene Dietrich said to Orson Welles in
Touch of Evil, "your future is all used up."