Obama can win but he'll have to work hard for it

Small change: in important areas Obama has been forced to continue the policies of his predecessor
12 April 2012

Last week, on a hot evening under heavy skies, I took my place in a Broadway queue for an Obama fundraiser. There were three such events in Manhattan that evening alone, and my theatrical benefit night was by far the cheapest. Obama, who is working very hard on his re-election, was going to move smoothly from event to event and try to make all of us feel special.

The hidden cost, which I hadn't noticed until too late, was that before we ever clapped eyes on the President we were going to have to sit through a performance of Sister Act, the nuns-on-the-run musical, with its seemingly limitless supply of songs about vague human aspirations - the sort of thing Broadway composers seem to turn out in their sleep. Whoopi Goldberg was on hand to say a few words about why Obama deserved another term.

It's impossible to sit in an American theatre where the President is about to appear without thinking of Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, Washington, in 1865. We had been, of course, well checked by security, and as the moment finally arrived for Obama to walk out from the wings there were plainclothes men with arms folded at all the exits. But still the sharp apprehension persisted.

Then the crowd went wild as the lone figure strode onto the stage. In a way, of course, it is irrational to think of him as someone alone - he has help and advice and protection on hand at all times, and he joked that evening a little ruefully about the thought that he might one day be able, again, to take a walk in Central Park with his wife.

Yet whenever I see him stepping towards the podium on television, or when he came out that night before a docile crowd of guaranteed supporters, I still think of him as a man alone, bearing all his virtues and shortcomings on his shoulders, ready to defend himself, yes, but aware too of the ways in which he has disappointed his admirers. A changed man he certainly is; as he pointed out, he has gone grey in office, and he jokes that his daughters tell him that this looks distinguished, while his wife tells him he looks old.

But it is not so much the greyness as the tension in the face and the thinness of the lips that tell the story. He was well aware, and he was quick to point out, that in addressing this particular audience he was preaching to the converted. But even preaching to the converted, it seemed, demanded a careful acknowledgment that things have not gone uniformly well for his presidency.

It's the economy, of course, that springs first to mind. For his friendly critics, the stimulus given was not nearly large enough. Then there's the military overstretch, the relative unpopularity of the war in Afghanistan and fresh unease about America's role in the Nato intervention in Libya.

What is striking in these cases is a kind of mismatch between Obama's notable, tangible achievements and the kind of president people wanted him to be. He can boast, for instance, of having saved the motor industry, but saving the motor industry was probably not uppermost in people's minds when they voted for Change We Can Believe In.

Obama's military record has turned out to be based partly on a policy of continuing some of the priorities inherited from his predecessor. No doubt there are Republicans who are prepared to praise, in private, this emphasis on continuity.

But continuity can hardly be dressed up as change.

Remember that, after the killing of Osama bin Laden, it was Obama who invited George Bush to go with him to Ground Zero, an invitation Bush refused. It would have been a continuity photo-op.

Then there is the notorious fiscal continuity trap - the hysterical refusal of Republicans to countenance any form of tax hike, and thus the continuation of Bush tax policies which, to Obama's natural followers, are the obvious source of the nation's current problems with the deficit.

Add to this a growing sense among Democrats that the Republicans actually do not want any solution to the country's problems - what they want is for Obama to fail - and you get a sense of the frustration inherent in the current situation.

Obama's answer to the faithful is: yes, the situation is messy and frustrating; yes, people are suffering as a result; but, hey, this is a democracy at work, and democracies are, or can be, messy and frustrating. And the answer to this point is that democracy didn't always feel as frustrating as this, or as messy.

Somewhere implicit in a successful democracy is an acknowledgment by the minority party that the majority has the right to pursue its legitimate goals. Somewhere implicit in the present situation is the belief that what Obama wants to do is unconstitutional - the President himself is some sort of illegal alien from outer space; Obamacare is unconstitutional; the intervention in Libya likewise. On it goes.

Bipartisanship - another form of continuity - has been an Obama ideal. Bipartisanship won an astounding victory last week, not in Washington but in Albany, New York, where the state legislature, with Republican help, finally passed a law legitimising gay marriage. It was an example at state level of the sort of co-operation not forthcoming at national level, and the architect of the agreement, Governor Andrew Cuomo, was immediately spoken of as a potential successor to Obama in 2016.

That implies, of course, that Obama will win his second term next year. He certainly knows that if he wants the win he has to work hard for it - and that's what we saw him doing, with great grace, energy and charm, alone on the Broadway stage.

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