Author Archive
Obama’s America- the Gordon Brown years?
Posted by Daniel Kalder in Obama, Politics, health care on October 7th, 2009
The 2008 election campaign filled me with an eerie sense of déjà vu, as I suspect it did many British people living in America. The hysterical reception accorded Barack Obama was strongly reminiscent of the frothing enthusiasm for Tony Blair in 1997.
Obama had a more inspiring biography than Tony Blair of course and did sincerity better; nevertheless there were many parallels. Both were relatively young, charismatic men who insistently repeated stirring but vague mantras about change and a coming new era to an exhausted electorate craving a break with the recent past. Both surrounded themselves with pop stars and other glamorous types, in an attempt to identify with everything that was young and progressive and hip. Of course, this being America, Obama operated on a much grander, messianic scale: Blair never implied that his victory might lower the earth’s water levels for example, and nor did anybody ever faint at his rallies as if he were a faith healer. However when Blair won the election the sympathetic Guardian newspaper did get rather overheated: I recall an article in which the atmosphere in the UK was compared to the relief felt at the end of World War II, thus equating the hapless John Major with Adolph Hitler. That total absence of proportion will sound familiar to anyone who has flicked through the People’s Temple style newsletter that is Newsweek or spent a few minutes watching the risible MSNBC. (In the Guardian’s defence however, none of its writers were ever so feeble-minded as to compare Blair to God.)
Anyway, during the election campaign I would say to those who asked for my thoughts on the Obama phenomenon that perhaps it wasn’t wise for so many people to allow themselves to be so carried away. Obama was only a man; worse still a politician; and even worse- not a very experienced one. I would then suggest that many Americans were setting themselves up for a massive disappointment: that the impossible expectations that Obama and his devotees had aroused would ultimately lead to profound disillusionment, leaving people even more cynical and embittered than if they had never been thus misled. Tony Blair’s career in Britain offered a shining example of this process in action. My listeners would then change the subject and never mention Obama to me again. I understood: they wanted to believe, they were protecting their faith.
Meanwhile I had a sinking suspicion that having evaded the Blair era in the UK (I was in Moscow, enjoying the regime of Vladimir Putin) I was about to experience the big budget American remake under Mr. Obama. Of course, it was never going to be an exact fit: Britain and America have different political systems, different histories and different cultures even if we speak (roughly) the same language. Yet peering through Obama’s cloud of lofty rhetoric I seemed to see a lot that was familiar. Like Blair, Obama was obsessed with his representation in the media and excessively keen to be perceived as cool and trendy. Like Blair, he was enthusiastic for a massive expansion of government, for the promotion of relatively unaccountable unelected officials into influential positions, for the incurring of massive debt to pay for his grand schemes, for promoting people with backgrounds in campus radicalism, and for great globs of toweringly ambitious but apparently half-baked reform.
The comparison was not perfect of course. Thankfully Obama showed no enthusiasm for several of Mr. Blair’s more notorious outrages, such as establishing a new criminal offence for every day he was in office, or transforming Britain into a paranoid, surveillance society. Nor did he speak of ‘Democracy’ in the same dreamy way as Blair, as if it was a metaphysical force for good in itself. Post- Iraq, Obama prefers sovereignty, including the sovereignty of scumbags. Still, Britain 1997- 2007 seemed like a reasonable rule of thumb for some of the president’s agenda at least.
Recently however I’ve started to think I may have been wrong. You see, Blair, for all his faults, got things done. He cracked skulls and enforced rigid party discipline. Armed with an overwhelming parliamentary majority and faced with an opposition in total disarray, he seized the moment to ram through reams of legislation. Obama on the other hand seems unable to achieve much of anything, as even SNL has noticed, while his party is impressively undisciplined. The absurd stimulus package, so obviously stuffed with un-stimulating pet projects was an embarrassment. Then there is the ongoing civil war between elements of the administration and the CIA; and the endless shenanigans over health care etc. It is starting to look as though Obama has little control over his own party, and that its hierarchy does not necessarily respect him. Every major initiative he sets out to pursue seems to degenerate into chaos.
However, it was as I was watching Obama make his pitch for Chicago before the IOC in Copenhagen that I knew I definitely had the wrong analogy. After all, Blair won the Olympic Games for London when everybody thought the city was going to lose. Obama, on the other hand, not only lost but made himself look ridiculous in the process- the most powerful man in the world come as a supplicant before the crooks of the IOC, only to be slapped down.
Perhaps we aren’t about to live through a remake of the Blair years after all. Blair is a winner, you see- even now many think he may live again as first president of the EU. Obama on the other hand, well… he used to look like a winner, but increasingly- not so much. Could it be then that the USA has fast forwarded to what followed Blair? Maybe there will be no period of hope giving way to gradual disillusionment, no period of furious reform collapsing into widespread cynicism. Maybe instead we’re going straight to the catastrophic aftermath- courtesy of a man with big dreams promoted beyond the level of his competence, besieged on all sides by disaster, unable to effect anything. Is Barack Obama actually America’s Gordon Brown? I hope not- for all our sakes.
No More Nukes: The Fantastical Dream of Barack Obama, Aged 48 and 1/6
Posted by Daniel Kalder in News, Obama on October 1st, 2009
When President Obama first announced his desire to rid the world of nuclear weapons, I laughed out loud. After all, what’s not to chuckle at?
Would he next offer future generations the gift of flight, like Britain’s Natural Law Party, or promise to abolish death like would-be Russian presidential candidate Grigory Grabovoi, shortly before he was jailed for accepting money to reincarnate a non-existent victim of the Beslan Tragedy?
Of course not, I thought. It’s just the usual political waffle, nothing to waste time thinking about. The president was striking a pose, attempting to sound statesmanlike, that sort of thing. All politicians indulge in this type of empty, grandstanding rhetoric and Obama’s personal weakness for it is well established. Meanwhile he had presented Russia with an opportunity to get rid of a lot of old weapons they didn’t really want any more, without losing face. Perhaps that was the plan: a conciliatory gesture to the Bear in the hope that it would help in other areas. Good luck with that, by the way.
However since then Obama has continued to insist on his dream of a world without nuclear weapons and I am starting to worry that he really means it. Last week at the UN we were all subjected to a bizarre spectacle- and I don’t mean Gaddafi’s highly entertaining stream of consciousness rant but rather the sight of the president of the USA waffling on about disarmament as if he were some kind of vegetable-munching German hippy living on a commune in 1970s Munich. In order to humor him, the Security Council then passed a resolution affirming his audacious- or rather comical- hope. That was easy enough of course – as we all know, the UN passes resolutions all the time which nobody has any intention of following.
Curiously enough neither the resolution nor Mr. Obama made reference to Iran or North Korea, two states obviously intent on increasing the number of nuclear weapons in the world and who have ignored a good deal of Security Council resolutions themselves. Instead Mr. Obama waited until a meeting of the G20 in Pittsburgh a day later before denouncing a ‘suddenly discovered’ Iranian nuclear facility he already knew about, and which President Bush had known about before him. Gordon Brown and Nicholas Sarkozy stood by his side, offering moral support. However reports soon started to surface that Sarkozy had wanted to confront Iran at the UN the day before, and had offered scathing criticism of Mr. Obama’s pipe dream.
Sarkozy thus seems to believe the president is sincere. However I think we should all attempt to understand what this means before we rush to judgment. Last night I considered the possibilities. This is what I came up with:
1) Obama used to be an academic and has spent a lot of time in the company of various washed- up 1960s radicals. Perhaps, having only relatively recently left behind that playground he doesn’t realize how ridiculous he sounds. If so, we can only hope that he learns quickly.
2) All that messianic rhetoric he spouted during the campaign was not just the calculated blather I assumed it was but actually sincere. He really believes, like the late Michael Jackson, that he can heal the world. By contrast, at least Mahmoud Ahmadinejad holds that a supernatural messiah will bring about universal salvation and not himself. But while the president does display numerous signs of narcissism, I still think this is too far fetched.
Then I started to think about option 3, a variation on #2 I admit, but with a patina of rationality that would appeal to a subtle thinker like Mr. Obama. Perhaps he believes that it is impossible to persuade Iran and North Korea to disarm while Israel, the USA and other countries have nuclear weapons. In this he is most likely correct. Perhaps he even accepts that they have a point- at least insofar as they claim it is manifestly unfair to prohibit one country from enjoying the benefits of a healthy atomic arsenal when you have one yourself. And perhaps- now this is a stretch, I admit- he thinks that the two regimes are led by rational and reasonable men who would agree to give up their weapons programs if the rest of the world also disarmed. Then everybody could go home happy.
Now I know that this sounds shockingly naïve but it does explain why he went out of his way to avoid confronting the Iranians at the UN. It also strikes me as the kind of conceit which, dressed up with enough academic think tank hokum, an intellectual of Mr. Obama’s stature could just about believe in. It’s ‘fair’ and ‘reasonable’ after all, and are we not all fair and reasonable men at heart?
Actually, no we’re not. I therefore think it is time we banded together to persuade the president to stop wasting his time and energy. Obviously he won’t listen to anything Fox or Talk Radio has to say, and MSNBC is also a lost cause- that channel produces agitprop strictly for the internal consumption of the Democratic Party faithful. Therefore I would like to suggest to the editors and producers at CNN, ABC, CBS, the New York Times and all those other prestigious news sources that pride themselves on their journalistic integrity that every time Mr. Obama mentions his delusion at a press conference their reporters should openly snigger, and when they write about his speeches later they should preface his words with a phrase such as ‘naïve dream’ or ‘charming fantasy’. Nothing too harsh- we all know he is a sensitive soul. There’s no need to worry about journalistic ethics- this would not be editorializing but a mere statement of fact, like saying the world is round, not flat. And that way, with gentle encouragement from friends, the president might finally set aside childish things and start taking the issue of nuclear proliferation seriously- just as the Iranians and the North Koreans do.