From: senaey fethi (senaeyfethi@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Jan 27 2009 - 15:13:23 EST
Betrayed by Obama
Jan 22nd 2009
>From The Economist print edition
Some of the new president’s most ardent supporters already feel let down
ANY decision Barack Obama makes can cause a stir. He invited Rick Warren, a popular pastor, to say a few words at his inauguration. The aim was to stroke conservative Christians, thereby fostering a warm feeling of national unity. But some of Mr Obama’s gay supporters were appalled. Though hardly a fire-breather by the standards of Southern Baptists, Mr Warren holds old-fashioned views about homosexuality. Bloggers lamented Mr Obama’s “betrayal”. Dan Savage, a gay columnist, urged his readers to protest by coining a new meaning for “Saddleback”—the name of Mr Warren’s church. Many of the suggestions were unprintable. To soothe sore tempers, Mr Obama invited a gay bishop, Gene Robinson, to speak at an inaugural concert.
It has been only two-and-a-half months since Mr Obama was elected, but his “Yes, We Can” coalition is already fraying at the edges. In his appointments and pronouncements, Mr Obama keeps hinting that he is neither as radical nor as pure as his progressive supporters dared to hope. Anti-war activists, who rallied round him in the Democratic primaries because he was the only top-tier candidate to have opposed the Iraq war from the outset, now see worrying signs that their hero is a closet hawk. On the stump, he used to say things like: “I will bring this war to an end in 2009. So don’t be confused.” Now he says it might take a bit longer. To make matters worse, he has kept George Bush’s defence secretary, Robert Gates, in his job. “Not a single member of Obama’s foreign-policy [and] national-security team opposed the war,” fumes Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of the Nation, a lefty magazine, adding that Mr Gates is “a terrible
pick”.
Far from ending Mr Bush’s war on terror, Mr Obama plans to ramp it up in Afghanistan, albeit under a different label. When Israel started bombing Gaza, he barely protested. Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, an anti-war group, howled that Mr Obama “has been missing in action” while the people of Gaza were being massacred. Others go further. John Pilger, an Australian journalist, bristles that the vice-president, Joe Biden, is “a proud war-maker and Zionist”, while Mr Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is a Zionist who “opposes meaningful justice for the Palestinians”. Some folks are outraged, too, by Mr Obama’s rumoured selection of Dennis Ross, a veteran of Bill Clinton’s administration, as his point man on Iran. Robert Naiman, an analyst at a group called Just Foreign Policy, thinks Mr Ross might “set the stage for war with Iran”. (Mr Ross favours offering Iran carrots and sticks to abandon its nuclear ambitions, but will not rule
out military action.)
During the campaign, Mr Obama called the prison at Guantánamo Bay a “betrayal of American values” and promised to close it. On his first day in office he suspended legal proceedings against the inmates. But he has yet to figure out what to do with them. In an interview with the Washington Post, he said he would consider it a failure if he had not closed the prison system down by the end of his first term. On anti-terrorism policy generally, Dick Cheney, the former vice-president, recently remarked that before Mr Obama started to keep his campaign promises, he needed “to sit down and find out precisely what it is we did and how we did it.” Mr Obama described this as “pretty good advice”. The people who used to flock to his rallies with placards demanding that Mr Bush and Mr Cheney be tried as war criminals are aghast, not least because Mr Obama appears disinclined to prosecute anyone.
For the left, the list of Mr Obama’s betrayals—real or anticipated—is getting longer. His economic advisers are nearly all centrists. Far from bringing capitalism to heel, he is planning to save it. His choice for attorney-general, Eric Holder, used to work for big corporations, making him a “poster-child for…selling out,” grumbles David Corn of Mother Jones, a progressive magazine. Unions fret that Mr Obama will not campaign hard enough to increase their clout. Greens worry that he will not move fast enough to rescue the planet. The National Organisation for Women complains that his economic-stimulus package will pump too much money into male-dominated industries such as construction, leaving only scraps for teachers and social workers.
There’s no pleasing some people
Should Mr Obama worry about all this? Not much. For one thing, he is still hugely popular. A whopping 79% of Americans approve of him. Two days before the inauguration, when a preacher told a crowd that Mr Obama was not the Messiah, he was booed (in jest, one hopes). For another, Mr Obama is not breaking as many promises as his former fans imagine. Mostly, he is breaking only promises they think he made. Had they read the small print, they would have seen that he left himself some wiggle room. During his campaign Mr Obama was, as he put it himself, “a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project[ed] their own views”. He gave a lot of people the strong impression that their most urgent goals were also his. As president, he can no longer maintain this illusion.
He must make trade-offs. He wants to cool the planet, but without stifling growth. He wants to close Guantánamo, but without freeing anyone who will then shoot up a shopping mall. He cannot govern from the centre without upsetting his left flank from time to time; nor should he try. He also wants to be re-elected and, if the past is any guide, he will pursue this goal with ruthless pragmatism. During the campaign, for example, he said he favoured civil unions but refused to endorse gay marriage. Cynical observers suspected a fudge—that he said this only to dull the sting of Republican attack ads. It seems the cynics were right: last week a gay paper dug up a long-lost questionnaire from 1996 in which he strongly endorsed gay marriage. In this case, Mr Obama really is more liberal than the image he projected. In others, the opposite may be true. The world will know soon enough.