OPINION:The changes the US president has brought to his country during his first 100 days in office are truly significant, writes NIALL STANAGE.
THE DAY after Barack Obama won the American presidency, I received an e-mail from a friend in New York. I was still in Chicago at the time, where I had watched the new president-elect address a crowd of about 240,000 people the previous night. The atmosphere on the Windy City’s streets would remain exultant for a long time, and with good reason: a man who had been an obscure local politician less than five years before had risen to the world’s most powerful elected office.
Back in New York, my friend wrote, the atmosphere was “like a liberation. I can’t describe it any other way”. Another New York-based Obama supporter, Jennifer Tuttle, whom I had met when she was volunteering for the then-senator during the early days of his arduous primary battle with Hillary Clinton, had attended a party with her husband on election night. As she travelled home, she told me, “people were literally running through the streets screaming. It was unbelievable. It was like the war had ended and the soldiers were coming home.”
When a politician arouses such intensity of emotion, one common assumption is that disenchantment must lie just around the corner. Like so much of the conventional wisdom that has swirled around Obama throughout his political career, this has proved to be wrong – at least so far. There may be more troubles to come, especially on the economy, but the bond between Obama and the nation he leads remains strong and steady for now.
The most recent poll numbers from Gallup indicate that 66 per cent of Americans approve of the job he is doing as president, with only 27 per cent disapproving. The same organisation last Friday reported that 86 per cent of Americans believe Obama has either met or exceeded the expectations they had of him when his presidency began.
Even those statistics do not tell the whole story. Obama is delivering upon one of his most central promises to America’s liberals. He is bringing their government’s conduct back into approximate alignment with the nation’s guiding principles. America, more so than Ireland, defines itself through ideas, from the assertion of “certain unalienable rights” in the Declaration of Independence to the commitment to “liberty and justice for all” in the Pledge of Allegiance.
The reality, of course, has often fallen short of the aspiration. But rarely in the modern age have the aspirations themselves been so comprehensively traduced as they were under the Bush administration, from Guantánamo Bay to Abu Ghraib.
Obama has moved fast to resuscitate the old, nobler vision of America. In his first week in office, he announced plans for the closure of Guantánamo, banned torture and brought an end to the CIA’s use of secret prisons overseas. Those decisions amounted to more than the sum of their parts: cumulatively, they made clear that Obama was intent upon heaving America back onto the right track.
Shifts in political culture are inherently hard to measure, but Obama’s successes have, at the least, forced a reappraisal of some of the more depressing assumptions that had come to surround American civic life. At the hands of men like Karl Rove, political discourse had seemed to be on an inexorable downward path towards ever-greater coarseness and infantilisation. The sound-bite and the smear were the weapons of choice, and a tendency to give voice to complex thoughts was regarded as a fatal weakness.
Yet Obama’s candidacy was built around elevated rhetoric and an unmistakeable sophistication – witness, for instance, the nuanced speech on race made in response to the emergence of his controversial former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, last year. It was notable, above all, for its respect for the intelligence of the audience – and it was also effective politically.
Obama’s disinclination to dumb down his approach has remained intact in office. One especially impressive example came with a major address, delivered two weeks ago at Georgetown University, which outlined how closely the nation’s economic wellbeing was linked with other, apparently discrete, issues like healthcare provision, education and the environment.
Obama’s joined-up thinking, his erudition, and the apparent efficacy of both traits, has left the conservative movement in some disarray. Media demagogues such as radio host Rush Limbaugh and Fox News channel’s Sean Hannity continue to trade in shrill, anti-Democratic simplicities. But, though their audiences lap up their hyperbolic outrage, a Republican Party that merely mimics them will find itself on too narrow a platform to win national elections.
Strategically-minded Republicans are, in fact, increasingly worried about the extent to which their party has been hoist by its own petard. The Grand Old Party has in recent years demanded of its representatives an unstinting allegiance to right-wing orthodoxy. In the process, the old-style Main Street Republican – a species that included former presidents like Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford and, to some extent, George H W Bush – has come to teeter on the brink of extinction. From where, then, will the Republicans draw a candidate capable of beating a Democratic president who appeals to the middle ground as assiduously as Obama?
Perhaps the most common complaint aimed at Obama from the liberal-left, especially in Europe, is that he has brought about changes that are merely symbolic and stylistic, and thus lack substance.
Firstly, this ignores the policy changes he has made since taking office, from setting a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq to expanding a government healthcare programme so that it covers an extra four million poor children.
Secondly, the critics miss the point. Symbolic change is not inherently insubstantial. On the contrary, it can have concrete and far-reaching effects.
I think of my friend Brenda Williams, a 57-year-old African-American doctor in South Carolina, who had grown up in segregated Georgia and was an early Obama supporter. At one pre-election rally, she recalled, she had been astonished at the sight before her eyes: “There were all these white people with Obama T-shirts on,” she said to me with a laugh. “I had to call my husband. I told him: ‘You have to see this. Look at all these white folks going around with a black man’s face on their chest’.”
Is that change purely cosmetic? Hardly. It was enough to convince Williams that there was “something revolutionary going on in America” and that the toxic hatreds that had disfigured the land of her youth were finally dissolving. I think of Obama’s overtures to those who are ostensibly hostile to him, both domestically (traditional, but potentially disaffected, Republican voters) and internationally (the government of Iran). Obama does not believe these efforts will magically produce a universal endorsement of his agenda at home, or an instant detente with Tehran. But he does believe that respect and civility can prepare the ground for progress in a way that his predecessor’s contemptuousness never could. If that view continues seeping into the body politic, and into American society more generally, its transformative potential is almost boundless.
I think also of Harlem, where I live. The area has undergone some gentrification in recent years but its population remains overwhelmingly African-American. Next week, I will go to a local school, where I have been invited to speak at its Careers Day. There, I will have the pleasure of meeting pupils whose expectations for their futures have been irrevocably and positively altered, so their teachers say, by the election of a president who looks more like them than any who has gone before.
There is nothing insubstantial about that.
At many of the Obama rallies I witnessed last year, an old civil rights anthem, sung by Sam Cooke, would blare from loudspeakers as the crowd waited for the candidate to appear. The song was called A Change is Gonna Come.
And now it has.
Niall Stanage is the author of Redemption Song: Barack Obama – From Hope to Reality (Liberties Press). He was born and grew up in Belfast but has lived in New York since 2003