Six years to the day later, on the morning of November 5 last, Obama became the lamest of all lame duck presidents. American voters inflicted on him a resounding defeat in the mid-term elections to the House of Representatives and 36 Senate seats. The man who in 2008 won the largest share of popular vote by any Democrat in 50 years and helped the party wrest eight senate seats from the Republicans had managed to lose at least seven seats in the Senate, ceding its control to the Republicans. They also gained 10 seats in the House which they already controlled.
That was exceptional even in view of the historic generalisation that the party in the White House fares poorly in mid-term polls. This kind of a rout of the Democrats in the Congress had not been seen since 1929. While Obama himself was not and will never again be on the ballot, the 2014 election was very much a referendum on him, not unlike the Indian elections on one Mr Narendra Modi.
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After six years, voter fatigue for the incumbent president is to be expected. The Obama approval ratings had plummeted to the 40s, not any higher than those of his unlamented predecessor, George W Bush. The battle for the Congress appeared lost even before it began. But this time around, Americans were effectively telling Obama, “Go, for God’s sake.” The rest of the world did not seem to be too anxious to see him stay either.
The much hoped-for transformational presidency lay in ruins as a mediocre administration. This descent has been much discussed and some of the conclusions are now well known. The Obama administration had begun to unspool from the very start, caught as it was in the stiff opposition from the Tea Party movement and its adherents in the Congress on the health care reform. The president managed to push through his version now dubbed Obamacare. That has shown some good results for the excluded but has aroused deep resentment from a larger majority. The economy recovered, albeit slower than the exalted promises in Obama speeches, and unemployment declined from a historic high of 7.8 per cent to a more acceptable 5.8 per cent. But those gains appeared to be dwarfed by the repeated Budget and debt limit roadblocks that a recalcitrant House forced. Many who had lost jobs in the recession had to settle for lesser ones, and some even stayed off the job market.
Obama the peace warrior who was bestowed the Nobel even as he had just begun his presidency was bogged down in unending conflicts in the Arab world and Afghanistan. His policy of phased disengagement came unstuck as the false dawn of Arab spring gave way to internecine warfare. The American flair for regime change to usher in democracy was in a shambles all across North Africa and West Asia.
This last year saw a rapid diminishment of the American image. Not only was it no longer the world’s policeman as Vladimir Putin and Bashaar al-Assad thumbed their noses at it, but was actually threatened by the barbaric and brutal Islamic State, neutralising the advantage gained by the liquidation of al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden. Older voters brought up on the image of American invincibility did not take too kindly to this perception. The younger ones were simply bewildered.
But all these analyses do not see, if not deliberately ignore, the elephant in the room: Obama’s racial origins. The “birthers,’ who doubted Obama’s American nativity, were an extreme manifestation of it. Half a century after the enactment of the civil rights bill, a large number of Americans are still not at ease with a person of colour as the chief executive of the nation. The irony is that the half-Caucasian Obama was not white enough for the whites and at the same time not black enough for the blacks. His upbringing, education and career, the stuff of making of ideal candidates for high offices did not overcome the distrust of the conservative Middle America, but effectively alienated him from the poor, working class African-Americans, many of whom say without the slightest irony that Bill Clinton was the first black president of the US!
At the heart of the Obama tragedy lies the warning Cassius uttered in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, /But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Gifted with formidable intellect and unparalleled oratory, Obama grew ever more aloof and distant even from his own supporters. Having diagnosed the problem and found solutions in his mind, he became withdrawn from those who would not see this or were slower than him. His famed gift of speech became increasingly didactic and less inspirational and rousing. Unfortunately, many of those he addressed were those whose co-operation and participation, howsoever reluctant, was absolutely essential for his decisions to be approved and implemented.
The American polity works on a system of checks and balances. The constitutional ‘advise and consent’ role of the Congress is not to be trifled with. Obama’s disdain for the elected representatives, some from his own party, was barely concealed. The Republicans were only too happy to block him whenever they could with the tacit approval of conservative Democrats. The feeble efforts of the president at bipartisanship were rebuffed by the opposition and resented by his supporters. The scholarly Obama not only did not draw lessons from Lyndon Johnson’s adroit exercise of presidential power, but also ignored Honest Abe’s well-documented scheming to get the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery passed by a hostile Congress. Obama became gradually a prisoner of his own image propelling his effectiveness on a downward spiral.
The epitaph on the Obama presidency was written by the literary critic F R Leavis in a 1937 essay “Diabolical intellect and noble hero,” on another Shakespearean hero, Othello: “in ...[the] tragedy ...Othello is the chief personage ...in such a sense that the tragedy may fairly be said to be Othello’s character in action.”