US: Obama One Year after Elections (Nigel Jones, UK)

It’s hard to believe that the US presidential elections of 2008, so thoroughly scrutinized on the e-pages of WAIS, celebrate their first anniversary today (4 November). To mark the occasion, we hear from Nigel Jones:

I have been waiting in vain for American WAISers to start a discussion a year after the election of President Barack Obama–or the Blessed One, as he is known in some disrespectful quarters.

Perhaps they are keeping quiet out of sheer embarrassment? Let me, therefore, with due trepidition as a mere Brit, get the ball rolling and attempt a provisional first-year report on the BO as he appears from over the pond, who, let us not forget, is already one quarter of the way through his first (and hopefully only) term in office.

It is an appropriate day to attempt such an assessment, since it is not only a year to the day since the President was elected; but, by unhappy (for him) coincidence, it is also the day when the GOP won back the Governorship of one state–Virginia, which fell to the Dems relatively recently–and took a second, New Jersey, from the Democrat incumbent, in the first statewide win in a traditionally Democratic state since 1997. And this despite the BO personally intervening in the campaign. His long honeymoon with the voters seems to be definitively over. The bubble has burst, not with a bang but a whimper.

It is not before time. For, wherever we look, the Obama administration is a disaster zone with a capital D.

A year in and the administration has failed to lift the economy from the doldrums, with ten percent of the workforce jobless, a dollar plunging nearly as fast as the BO’s poll ratings and a country mired in unsustainable debt. (Just like Britain, in fact.)

Despite controlling both houses of Congress, BO has failed to implement the central plank of his platform: Health Service reform. Hardly surprising really, since it would cost $1.055 trillion dollars over a decade, and could only be funded by higher taxes which Americans are understandably reluctant to pay.

The hallmark of BO’s style is not the smack of firm government, but the prolonged dither. He has deliberated for months over where to go in Afghanistan, preferring to spend time on the golf course or windbagging in TV studios rather than take a hard decision on a fruitless and unwinnnable war that is killing young Americans almost daily. We’re still waiting for him to make that choice.

He has failed to close the Guantanamo detention centre, despite promising to do so.

After pumping $787 billions into the economy–enacting the traditional Democrat remedy that the way to solve a problem is to drown it in other people’s cash–that money has now gone with the wind and the US has a projected cumulative deficit of $9 trilllion dollars over the next ten years: a debt to make even our own Prime Minister, Gordon “borrower” Brown’s eyes water.

In foreign affairs, apart from the Afghan quagmire, the BO has achieved precisely nothing. The Israeli-Palestine stalemate remains exactly where it was. Iran is busy completing its nuclear programme without a squeak of protest; he has stripped eastern Europe of its missile defence system without getting so much as a “thanx” in return from Russia.

Even in peacenik, left-wing, Europe that ole BO magic appears to be wearing thin: a personal appearence by the President at Copenhagen failed to secure the 2016 Olympics for his hometown of Chicago. OK, he did win the Nobel Peace Prize–but that was ludicrously decided upon by the Awards committee only days after he moved in to the Oval office.

Faced with this mounting array of failure, ineptitude and stasis, what has the BO done? Why, what most failing leaders do: he has blamed the Media, heaping abuse on the one major TV outlet not to have fallen under his spell–Fox News.

It is scarcely surprising that more and more Americans are wondering what they did in that moment of madness one year ago. The unpalatable truth is that, sickened by the idiocies of George W. Bush, they elected a Bozo of awesome proportions. A silver tongued Bozo, perhaps, but a Bozo all the same. Despite the soaring, empty rhetoric, he is beginning to make Jimmy Carter look like Cicero.

I feel at least slightly qualified to attack Obama because my country too elected a preening, narcissistic, strutting vacuum in 1997–and are still paying the price for having done so. In six months we will finally eject our useless left-wing Government. I’m sorry that you have another three years of pain to endure before you get the chance to do the same.

Oh, yes, and where exactly did he put that pesky birth certificate?

JE comments: Anyone willing to come to President Obama’s defense? He hasn’t been brought down by any major scandals during his still-young administration. But on the other hand, the economy has not turned around, at least not in my neighborhood, and the (ever-diminishing) buck inevitably stops on the presidential desk. Unless recovery comes soon, he will be blamed.

President Obama is doing a lot, but has he done anything? Time will only make it more difficult for him to enact significant reform. It is inevitable that the Democrats will lose some seats in Congress in next year’s elections–if mid-term election history teaches us anything, it is that yesterday’s contests in New Jersey and Virginia will be a harbinger of 2010.