Barack Obama's year
Neil Macdonald
Is there any hope left?
Last Updated: Wednesday, November 4, 2009 | 4:32 PM ET
By Neil Macdonald CBC News
It's been a year since Barack Obama stood on a stage in Chicago's Grant Park on a balmy November night and made Americans feel, for a little while at least, that their world wasn't coming down around their ears.
Cocking his head the way he does, radiating maturity and common sense, he talked about remaking the nation "block by block, brick by brick, callused hand by callused hand."
It was a brief speech by Obama standards but laden with the dreamy, tranquilizing platitudes Americans wanted so badly, at least back then. I was standing on a camera riser just across from the stage and I can report it was thrilling, even for someone who makes a professional effort not to be thrilled by political speeches.
President-elect Barack Obama and his vice-president Joe Biden on election night at Chicago's Grant Field, Nov. 4, 2008. (Alex Brandon/Associated Press) Here was a man, whose very appearance screamed change, talking about how "young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native-American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled" had come together and shown that America is not a country of two polarities — left and right — but rather a truly United States.
Tears flowed
People wept. Oprah Winfrey, down on the grass in the special VIP section, hugged somebody and wept.
Jesse Jackson (who once declared that he'd like to castrate Obama for, in his view, speaking down to black people) finished his rounds of all the reporters on the riser, me included, made his way to the first pool camera he could find down on the grass and wept right in front of it, thus ensuring an image that would play for days to come on cable TV.
Up on stage, the president-elect poured it on, talking about how Americans were, as ever, willing to "put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day."
Then, abruptly, he walked off stage.
It was as if he'd suddenly realized he didn't have to say all this stuff anymore.
Sweet dreams
After a while, Oprah and everybody else stopped crying and drifted out into cordoned-off downtown Chicago where the street parties were just starting to swing.
Americans really were happy that night. A middle-aged CBC colleague of mine reporting in front of the White House was mobbed and pawed and kissed by celebrating college students, something he'd probably given up on ever experiencing again.
And now here we are, a year later. All those millions of humid, enthusiastic Obamaniacs have calmed down — "gone to sleep," in the words of Pew pollster Andrew Kohut — and everybody knows that nothing much has transformed at all.
It's become almost cliché to rattle off all the things Obama and the Democrats have not done. But for the record:
No new environmental policy, no new energy policy, no new policy on dealing with 11 million illegal immigrants. No end to many of the federal government's bigoted policies toward gays. No universal health care (though a massive bill is on the congressional table).
There has also been no end to American agents kidnapping people in other countries. Nor to the American drones that are still bombing the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, killing civilians in the process.
One hundred and seventeen thousand troops remain in Iraq. Obama is considering sending 40,000 more into Afghanistan.
He has made good on his commitment to be nicer to the rest of the world, for which he promptly won a Nobel Peace Prize.
But as for most of the other promises? He counsels patience these days, rather than hope.
If he were king
Now, part of this standstill is because of the division of powers in the U.S.
As James Thurber, a presidential historian at American University here in Washington, put it: "If he was king — and we had a revolution against the king, so we don't like that idea — if he was king, he could get those things through."
Thurber says Obama has made some changes, mostly by edict: He cites 29 in total, notably the reversal of the Bush-era ban on funding stem cell research, and a re-outlawing of torture, a practice the Bush administration embraced.
Obama also continued the bank rescues begun by his predecessor, which seemed to stabilize the U.S. economy back in the spring.
As for the big promises, says Thurber: "This is a representative democracy with lots of different interests that disagree with him. And that's what he's experiencing."
Of course, Obama, a former professor of constitutional law, knew all about the division of power when he was making all those promises.
Obama supporters on election night, Nov. 4, 2008, at Grant Field in Chicago. Everyone wept. (David Guttenfelder/Associated Press) But it wouldn't be a problem, he assured everybody, because he, Obama, the great mediator, would bring together the right and left in some sort of modern-day healing circle and the old deadlocks would crumble.
'Hopium'
John Kass, an old acquaintance of Obama and a columnist at the Chicago Tribune, says Obama was dealing "hopium," and that the chattering classes and opinion leaders bought it by the kilo.
But, as it turns out, Obama not just failed to win over Republicans, he hasn't even been able to corral the so-called "blue-dog" conservatives in his own party.
Once they sensed that all the euphoria of the presidential win was wearing off, some Democrats turned their attention to getting re-elected themselves, in the process defying him, especially on economic issues.
And with some reason.
Obama, in fact, has continued the wild spending his Republican predecessor began in order to try to keep the economy from tipping into the abyss, or melting down, or imploding, to use the doomsday parlance of a year ago.
As a result, the American national debt is $12 trillion and climbing.
The deficit for the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30 was $1.4 trillion, which means the U.S. government borrowed more that year than Canada's entire economic output.
Economists expect trillion-dollar-plus deficits for years to come.
A world of pain
Just last month, one of Obama's economic advisers, Christina Romer, told the nation that the fantastically expensive stimulus program has pretty much had its effect.
It probably won't result in much growth next year, she predicted. Which poses the perfectly reasonable question: If only $194 billion of the stimulus money has been spent so far, and there will be no further impact, why keep spending the other $600 billion or so?
As Harvard University's Niall Ferguson puts it: "There is no credible move being made by the Obama administration to bring American public finances into balance even over a ten-year horizon."
On the contrary, he says "a whole world of pain lies ahead."
Ferguson posits a government manacled by spiraling debt costs, with the Federal Reserve printing trillions more to keep interest rates down. Ugly by any measure.
James Thurber is slightly more charitable: "He promised everyone was going to heaven without dying. That's what transformational figures do.
"Turns out you can't do it. You have to pay for it."
In other words, crushing debt, rather than the realization of fond hopes, may be Obama's legacy.
And that "arc of history" he referred to so poetically that lovely warm night a year ago remains resolutely unbent, despite all the earnest hands that were laid upon it.
