Democratic presidental nominee Barack Obama is up in the polls but I still don’t think he’s going to be the next president of the United States. I continue to believe that the majority of Americans who’ll bother to cast a ballot in November will opt instead for Republican John McCain. But the good news for Obama fans is that they’ll be able to keep believing in him for years afterward, because he’ll never get the chance to disappoint them as president.
To those who look forward to an Obama win and believe in his talk of transforming domestic and international politics, take heart. He’s probably better off in the popular imagination as a could-have-been, a prophet who lost at the polls but went on to mobilize popular support on important issues. He would be following in the footsteps of the much-lamented Al Gore, who has been wise enough not to spoil his legacy and his image as a statesman by taking another shot at the White House.
As a wise old political activist once told me, elections are about screwing your enemies, while governing is about screwing your friends. As president, Obama would be bound to disappoint and alienate millions of idealistic fans, who would not understand why, for example, his foreign and defence policies seemed so eerily reminiscent of Bush’s. Obama’s public pronouncements since he secured the Democratic nomination, and his trips to Afghanistan and Iraq in recent days, are designed to convince wavering American voters of the continuity of U.S. policy, not its imminent reversal. This is one way he’s trying to prevent Republicans from exploiting his supposed “softness” on security as an election issue. I don’t expect him to be successful.
It will be interesting to see how long Obama’s foreign policy team, heavy with Jimmy Carter veterans, stays with him—or how long it will be before a wayward opinion or two compels Obama to jettison them, much as he split with his former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
If Obama became president, there would inevitably come a point in his administration, as with Carter’s, where he would have to make a decision that would alienate a lot of foreigners, not to mention his core supporters at home. For Carter it was the decision to get tough with the Soviets over their invasion of Afghanistan. The end of détente and the return of Cold War politics came under Carter, not Reagan. Those who blame George W. Bush for the current state of the world would do well to remember that, just as they should keep in mind that it was Bill Clinton who bombed Iraq and Sudan in the 1990s, and who set the stage for a renewal of long-term Russian hostility by expanding NATO eastward.
Most Americans believe that Bush’s mismanagement of economic and foreign policy has been disastrous, and I agree with them. However, a lot of the problems we face in the world are inextricable from the structure of the international system and are not functions of particular personalities or even ideologies. This is particularly true in a policy-making environment like Washington, where the diffusion of decision-making power can halt a president in his tracks.
Anyone who believes that Al Gore would not have invaded Afghanistan or Iraq if he had been in the White House is dreaming. Gore would have been more likely to consult and to make a better effort at generating an illusion of consensus and reliance on diplomacy, and he probably would have implemented his policies more competently. But I very much doubt that his basic foreign policy decisions would have been different.
And as much his most ardent supporters in the election campaign contend that he is something new under the sun, President Obama would almost certainly prove them wrong.
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