Improbable hope

Barack Obama brings hope to the United States and to the world at a time when gloom and uncertainty seem to be taking over. The infectious euphoria of his victory is a mild inebriation we should all allow ourselves to enjoy, a welcome break in the clouds of gloom that still promise us tough times ahead.

Perhaps Barack Obama’s greatest burden is just that: not to disappoint us all. Black America and much more is overjoyed but Obama inherits an economy $480 trillion in debt and facing the world’s worst financial crisis for generations. To what extent can he change the lot of the underprivileged in the US?

Can he pull the US out of Iraq without provoking disaster across the Middle East? Can he bring Russia back to fruitful dialogue mode? How will his presidency affect the range of allies, puppets and opportunist friends collated by the US in the Bush era? The UK and Kazakhstan? Have we heard the last of Axes of Evil and Rogue States?

Will he be able to take the US from major cause of climate change per head to principal solution and crucial driving force? His potential for benign change in Africa is immense? Will he use it? Will he walk the talk or rely on his unquestionable showmanship to make us all believe that he has done much when effectively little or nothing is changed?

America is dreaming again and that is already heartening but it will take more than talk to keep it going. We have every reason to expect a New Deal from Obama. He is being touted as the Messiah who will put an end to the era which started with the election of Ronald Reagan to the White House. Can he pull that one off? Or will he seem to have made a change while preserving and indeed consolidating the fundamentals? We all live in hope even when we can agree that it is an improbable hope.

A new team and a different political culture, suppressed and denied for almost a decade, now takes up positions of decision-making. These are the people who will be calling the shots, the new incumbents. Will they set out the new rules of the game or will the lobbyists hold them down to the old ones? Who does call the shots, Barack Obama, his entourage or those who hold the purse strings? How much room to manoeuvre does a US president really have?

Will Barack Obama want to change the system that brought him to power? Closing down Guantanamo Bay and repealing the Patriot Act will earn him easy kudos from liberals but will he even dream of addressing the ludicrous electoral systems which exclude all minority parties from representation in Congress? If he is trapped in the cliché of the US being the cradle of democracy, he may never acknowledge that an infancy extended from 1787 to the present day may be a little too long.

Having become the darling of the free press, will he have any interest in revisiting its failure to function in the wake of 9/11? This bulwark of democracy, this fourth estate, evaporated as President Bush went to War on Terror. How free is the free press? What access does it allow minorities? Who owns it? Will Barack Obama dare to ask?

Eliminating the threat of an extension of the Bush/Reagan era through a McCain/Palin victory has been an achievement which earns Obama gratitude worldwide. Ironically it may serve to obscure the fact that the US is the basic resource of all those who want to reduce politics to bi-polar confrontation, a minority political culture among developed democracies but a growing and menacing trend in Italy and Poland as in Malta and Albania. Relief at getting rid of George W. Bush and his aliases may make us forget about the system that produces them.

A black US president, with family in Kenya and a Muslim education in Indonesia is himself a beacon of hope for tolerance and dialogue in a very troubled world. He becomes a disappointment once he rules over the “Best democracy money can buy” without acknowledging the dissonance.

Barack Obama already has his hands full dealing with a full agenda of massive challenges. He may be forgiven for directing his energies at these first and leaving the root issues for later. Still, it would be a severe disappointment if a president so well endowed to change America keeps himself too busy to take a shot at it. The time is right and he is the best man for it. There could be no better way to tell the rest of us that he truly means business. For him to be effective, to exorcise the Bush era, he must persuade the world that a post-Obama US will still bear his mark. That may be the greatest challenge of all.

http://www.harryvassallo.blogspot.com/

Dr Vassallo is a Member of the Committee of the European Green Party