America has a weak President obsessed by re-election.

United States of Paralysis

By Max Hastings
Last updated at 12:18 PM on 24th November 2011


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2065500/Barack-Obama-weak-President-United-States-Paralysis.html#ixzz1edQGksEz


With the world crying out for leadership, America has a weak President obsessed by re-election. But my bet is Obama will scrape back in because he’s opposed by buffoons and grotesques. The chilling alternative: one of the lunatics could win…

High hopes fading: Barack Obama is clinging to the White House amid collapsed poll ratings

President Bill Clinton once sighed: ‘I could have been a great President, if I’d lived in great times.’ Well, here we are today hardly living in ‘great times’ — but rather mightily troubled ones.
Markets tremble as the eurozone totters. The confrontation over Iran’s nuclear programme threatens to escalate. The United States has just signed a historic agreement about future force deployments in Australia, a reflection of mounting alarm about the strategic challenge from China.

Yet it is hard to suggest that Western nations are being governed by leaders remotely capable of matching the hour. The southern eurozone has been obliged to place itself in political receivership, abandoning government by elected representatives — a terrifying development for democracies.
President Nicolas Sarkozy of France would be a laughing stock, if he did not occupy such a critical post. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel might be an adequate city mayor, but is visibly overwhelmed by her responsibility for saving the European financial system. Britain’s David Cameron is marginalised.
More important still, however, is the vacuum across the Atlantic.
President Barack Obama, who took office almost three years ago amid such high hopes, now clings to the White House amid collapsed poll ratings and a real threat that the American people will evict him at next autumn’s election.
The United States, as that great historian Sir Michael Howard has said, remains ‘the only nation able, and sometimes willing, to get things done in the world’. Yet this mighty country today finds its political system almost paralysed, its leader overwhelmingly concerned with his own re-election next year, rather than with leading the West out of its slough of despond.

President Bill Clinton once sighed: 'I could have been a great President, if I¿d lived in great times.'

A European central banker said to me a few weeks ago: ‘If you ring up Washington and try to discuss the financial crisis, the Administration people say: ‘Please do not bother us with this sort of stuff until after next November’.
We are still 50 weeks from polling day, yet already election fever is sweeping the nation. Every major American newspaper devotes a daily page or three to the campaign.
Obama’s rival Republican candidates are pouring millions of dollars into TV ads. Whereas in January 2009, just 20 per cent of voters disapproved of Obama as President, 51 per cent now do. Three-quarters of Americans say they think their country is headed the wrong way — with the economy being handled incompetently.

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An average of all polls suggests that around 45 per cent of voters plan to support a Republican — any Republican — in 2012, against 42 per cent still rooting for President Obama.
Yet it seems foolish to take this at face value, unless or until the opposition has a credible candidate. Disillusionment with Obama’s curiously frigid administration is a pervasive theme, but his rivals for the greatest office on earth look like competitors in a holiday camp freak show.
Almost all are overtly homophobic and messianic opponents of abortion, even in cases of rape or incest. Their battle-cry is ‘small government!’.

Tarnished reputation: Herman Cain has been almost blown out of the water by serial allegations of sexual harassment

The Texan congressman Ron Paul says that in his first year as President he would abolish the departments of energy, commerce, education, interior, housing and urban development.
The campaign of Georgia pizza mogul Herman Cain has been almost blown out of the water by serial allegations of sexual harassment from former employees, but he is not great on issues either.
He now says he was not serious when he suggested building a lethal electric fence along America’s entire border with Mexico, to keep out illegal immigrants. But he drove another nail into his own coffin by exposing abysmal ignorance of foreign policy at an interview with newspaper editors.
Asked about the President’s handling of Libya, he first stalled by muttering enigmatically: ‘OK. Libya.’ Then he said he disagreed with Obama’s approach, but struggled to explain why. ‘Nope, that’s a different one,’ the Presidential hopeful said enigmatically. ‘I’ve got to go back and see. I’ve got all this stuff twirling around in my head.’
That was as far as anybody got in discovering the would-be Republican nominee’s position. Cain’s problem is that, like almost all his rivals, he is dumb about almost everything off his own local patch.
Say what you like about British politics, no MP of any party would dare to offer themselves as town dog-catcher while knowing as little about the world as the Republican Presidential candidates.

'Fruitcake':Michelle Bachmann supports the 'waterboarding' of terrorist suspects to secure information

An American professor of international politics blogged contemptuously last week: ‘I can only pick on an ignoramus so many times before it feels sadistic.’
Both Cain and his Republican rival, fellow fruitcake and Minnesota congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, assert support for the ‘waterboarding’ of terrorist suspects to secure information, while a spokeswoman for current Republican favourite and ex-Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney denies that waterboarding is torture.
The New York Times recoiled in disgust, saying: ‘There are few issues that more clearly define a candidate’s national security policy than a position on torture.’
Meanwhile, Texas governor Rick Perry announced on TV that he would abolish three departments, named two, then admitted that he had forgotten what the third was, and hung there on live TV trying to remember what it might be.
We should not waste more words on most of the Republican candidates, whose unfitness for the greatest elective office is manifest, and concentrate on Mitt Romney, who today seems the most plausible party nominee.
The best thing most people can say of him is that he is not Obama. Beyond that, his most conspicuous attributes are first, that he is a committed Mormon — tax filings have shown that his charitable foundation has given $5 million to the Mormon church. Second, he and his wife Ann are pretty.

Gaffe: Rick Perry announced on TV that he would abolish three departments, named two, then admitted that he had forgotten what the third was

This is important: nobody seriously ugly can nowadays hope to win an American election — Ed Miliband would fare even worse in America than he does in Britain. The highly regarded Republican governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, had to abandon hopes of running for the presidency because everybody agreed that he is embarrassingly overweight.
Finally, Romney is rich, with a fortune estimated at £170 million, made during a career in which he founded a private equity investment firm. Opinion is divided about whether this will help him towards the White House. More Americans than ever before are in revolt about the degree to which their country’s riches are concentrated in the hands of the few — note the immense and unexpected public support for the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ demonstrators in New York.
‘We are the 99 per cent,’ proclaim the protesters — contrasting themselves with the 1 per cent of Americans who control 20 per cent of national wealth. Despite being evicted from their Manhattan park site by police, they have since been back on the streets in big numbers. Their muddled but impassioned message strikes an echo almost everywhere save in the lunatic, gun-toting badlands of America’s Hicksville, Tea Party country.
The average American household now has a lower real income than a decade ago, when it was around $35,000 (£22,300) a year. Unemployment is stubbornly stuck at more than 9 per cent (compared to 8.3 per cent in Britain) — a level at which many political analysts claim that a sitting President becomes unelectable, because so many voters blame him for their plight. Almost a quarter of residential mortgages are stuck in negative equity.
Economics will dominate this election campaign where the majority of voters, in a country which traditionally respects and even reveres wealth, favour higher taxes for the rich.
Obama agrees with them — knowing this is one of his strongest cards.
Many ordinary Americans look at Mitt Romney and say: how can such a gilded, handsome child of privilege ‘feel our pain’? They can live with his Mormonism, but cannot forget fellow-Republican Mike Huckabee’s jibe that Mitt ‘reminds every American of the boss who once fired them’.
One of Romney’s key advisers says: ‘From the very beginning, this race has been about who can best articulate the case against Barack Obama.’

Rich: Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has a fortune estimated at £170million

But when you hear Romney say: ‘This century must be an American century. We have a President right now who thinks America is just another nation. America is an exceptional nation,’ you wonder what such waffle means.
And so to Obama, still the man to beat.
Some of the disappointments of this Presidency have not been his fault. He inherited a vast fiscal deficit from George W. Bush, supposedly the great conservative. The problems of America’s diminishing industrial competitiveness are deep-rooted, with the falling value of the dollar leading to a huge trade deficit, given the import/export imbalance. The Republicans in Congress have behaved with reckless, manic irresponsibility in prevaricating over budgetary reform.
But none of these things is the point. Obama has been the man in charge. He is almost bereft of that indispensable political skill, the ability to make people feel good. He has not one iota of Ronald Reagan’s folksy, cosy charm.
Obama’s cleverness is indisputable: he is a man comfortable with authority and with his office. But he has failed to display the political skills to get things done since his healthcare reform bill scraped through Congress two years ago.
Americans talk a lot about how they miss Bill Clinton. Memories of his womanising have faded; they just remember that he seemed to have a heart as well as a brain. Many Democrats regret that his wife Hillary did not win their party’s nomination in 2008 instead of Obama, and thus probably the presidency.
Now Secretary of State, she must be sweating at the prospect of a Republican winning next year’s election, possibly blowing away her own hopes of a 2016 run at the White House.

Retrospect: Many Democrats regret that Hillary Clinton did not win their party's nomination in 2008

A friend of mine here in Washington, disappointed as are many Democrats by Obama’s performance, said to me gloomily: ‘In America’s present mood, the country might, just might, be mad enough to elect a fascist idiot.’
This is indeed a possibility. But it seems more likely that Obama will benefit from his opposition being so pathetic and will scrape back into office next November.
The only things about which Republican supporters can agree is their hatred of the Washington political establishment, and then yearning to dump Obama.
But to achieve that, they need a credible standard-bearer and policies which might win middle America, rather than merely the lunatic fringes. Today, they have neither.

Avoiding defeat: It seems more likely that Obama will benefit from his opposition being so pathetic, and manage to stay in office

If Americans are depressed by the awful aridity of their politics and politicians, the rest of us have cause to share their gloom. The leader of the United States is still overwhelmingly the most important politician on earth.
He cannot be expected to save the eurozone. But he can be a critical inspirational and stabilising force on Europe’s affairs.
Today, instead, the United States is putting up the shutters, and will be almost closed for serious international business through the desperate year ahead, as the nation becomes totally immersed in the Presidential campaign.
The American political system has seldom, if ever, looked so inadequate to the challenges the country faces.
My bet is that Barack Obama will be returned to the White House next year, because he is opposed by grotesques and buffoons.
But if you want to be kept awake at night between now and then, think of the alternative: one of the lunatics could win. Then the crisis of leadership across the Western world, facing its gravest challenges in generations, would become truly frightening.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2065500/Barack-Obama-weak-President-United-States-Paralysis.html#ixzz1edPrcQyV