[Peace-discuss] BHO's future is all used up?

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Fall of Barack Obama: the polls portend disaster
	Obama offered Americans a free and easy pass to a better future:
	now they see it was an empty promise
	By Alexander Cockburn
	LAST UPDATED 7:35 AM, JULY 15, 2010

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 no 
single man, even if endowed with the communicative powers of Franklin Roosevelt, 
the political mastery of Lyndon Johnson and the brazen agility of Bill Clinton, 
could turn the tide that has been carrying America to disaster for 30 years.

Americans this summer 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, 
the people on part-time, the total is heading towards 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 programme - 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 US 
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 towards business and the rich. That 
was the neo-liberal 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 
get-go, 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. 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 inspire and rally 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-Qaeda 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. 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 November midterm elections. 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. 
Mesmerised 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."


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