TODAY Barack Hussein Obama will be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States of America. The eyes of the world will be on Washington, D.C., on this historic day. For the moment, the tragedy and suffering in Gaza will be put on the backburner because on the slim shoulders of this lanky young optimistic yet pragmatic politician lie the hopes and aspirations of the American nation and most of the world.
Had Obama been just another white middle-class candidate, the inauguration would perhaps have been tempered. But it is not. In fact, the president-elect will be the first African-American to occupy the White House and the equally famous Oval Office. The symbolism of the inauguration on the day after Martin Luther King National Memorial Day, in memory of the great African-American civil rights leader, could not be more poignant. Is today America’s coming of age?
Not surprisingly, America, so starved of dignity and self-respect both at home and in the world at large after eight years of a breathtakingly inept and corrupt Bush presidency, has been celebrating for three days in a flood of optimism and hope. It is as if the nation is undergoing a rebirth and Obama is poised to give his very own “Gettysburg” speech modeled on that of his hero, Abraham Lincoln. It is as if at last the American Dream of the Founding Fathers, one ignored and pushed aside by the perfidious Bush-Cheney administration, were once again reality.
In his formal acceptance speech after his stunning victory over Sen. John McCain on Nov. 4, Obama could not have been more to the point: “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy: Tonight is your answer. It is the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful about what we can achieve, to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day. It has been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.”
The world, so bereft of imaginative political leadership over the last decade or so, is desperate for Obama to succeed. They want a president who can marshal the American spirit and ingenuity to lead the world out of the worst financial crisis and recession since the 1930s. They want a president who will sincerely come to grips from Day One with what has been the most intractable conflict in the world for over a half a century — the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. They want a president who will bring the troops home from an illegal war in Iraq, and also commit more troops to Afghanistan in order to defeat Al-Qaeda and the Taleban insurgency. Above all, they want a president who can restore the United States in the eyes of the world as a beacon of democracy and liberty and justice for all.
Optimism and hope bring great expectations. Some would argue that given the current state of the US economy, which lost 2.8 million jobs in 2008 alone, and the near collapse of the US financial sector, the state of the nation has assumed Dickensian proportions. The danger is that the burden of expectations could be the very undoing of the Obama presidency, especially if he finds it difficult to help his supporters reclaim the American Dream as he has promised.
Obama’s team is peppered with pragmatism and yet calculation. His chief of staff, for instance, Rahm Emmanuel, is a staunch supporter of Israel and a former member of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). How will this play in Obama’s attempt to bring peace to the Middle East? Or how will the enigmatic Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has been known for her anti-Israeli gaffes, set US foreign policy?
Obama is supposedly planning to reach out to the Muslim world. One of his aims in his first 100 days is to visit a Muslim country. It would have been a real statement of intent had he appointed an American-Muslim as a fairly prominent member of his administration. To his credit he has insisted on following tradition. His full name — Barack Hussein Obama — will be used in his inauguration despite taunts by his detractors that it sounds “Muslim.”
However, gestures are not going to deliver a two-state solution in Palestine. Obama will have to do what no American president in recent history has done — pursue a more neutral policy as far as Israel is concerned and stand up to the fundamentalist elements in the Jewish state who are bent on building illegal settlements on Palestinian land and, therefore, sustaining the occupation of the territories.
No US president will abandon the country’s support of Israel. On the face of it, that would be political suicide. But if ever America is ready for a change in its partisan policy in support of Israel, it is now. What the world — including the Arab and Muslim world — wants is a more evenhanded approach to the Palestinian problem.
There is a challenge here for the Muslim world as well. Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and others must give Obama the benefit of the doubt. They have to engage without stridency, chauvinism and a misplaced and empty sense of victory. Obama’s style and intellect points toward a preference for engagement. Those in the US and elsewhere should not see this as a sign of weakness. On the contrary, he is daring to do what others before him have either failed or refused to do.
The challenge for Obama is not how he will stand up to those outside the US — he has already warned the enemies and detractors of the US that he is prepared to use force if necessary — but to those in the US. If he merely decides to run policy on the basis of reaction as opposed to proaction, then his presidency will degenerate into disappointment and he will find his supporters abandoning him en masse.
Obama needs to rise above the presidency and not be weighed down by his office. Parallels have already been made with the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Obama’s New Deal, like Roosevelt’s, will take on mind-boggling new dimensions — $1 trillion just for an economic stimulus package. The dynamics have changed. Economic power has shifted to the East.
A nation accustomed for decades to cheap food, cheap gasoline, cheap goods and a wanton abandonment of environmental responsibility needs to look to itself first. Every American who espoused change at the ballot box last November must share in this responsibility with the president, starting today. In that way only will the Obama campaign chorus of “yes we can” come anywhere near being realized.
— Mushtak Parker is a business and political analyst based in London.
