President Obama takes office

So, we have a new President. I’m not enthusiastic about his prospects – but then, as you’ll know if you read my pre-election posts, I wasn’t enthusiastic about either candidate for the office. I suspect that President Obama’s background in the sewer of corruption that is Chicago politics, plus his lifelong involvement with and support for the radical Left personified by Alinsky, Ayers & company, will rapidly come to the fore. Quite frankly, I don’t see how they can’t.

I’m profoundly disturbed by the way the mainstream media in the US either covered up or ignored these issues during the campaign. I’m even more disturbed by the way they’ve continued to ignore them in the run-up to the inauguration. It’s almost as if they don’t care any more – they’re so ideologically linked to President Obama that any criticism or in-depth soul-searching is taboo.

Overseas columnists and newspapers aren’t so restricted, of course. There have been two editorial articles today that put things fairly clearly into perspective.

Writing in the Daily Mail, Melanie Phillips has this to say.

Has everyone lost their marbles? The inauguration of President Obama is being treated like the Second Coming.

The coverage is so gushing we might all drown. Of course it’s a great thing that America, with its history of slavery and segregation still a shockingly recent memory, now has a black President; the palpable joy of African-Americans is entirely understandable and deeply touching. And there’s no doubt that Obama is a highly charismatic and attractive personality.

But what’s more than a wee bit troubling is that the swooning hysteria reflects the fact that people appear to believe that as of today the world will be saved. Swords will be beaten into ploughshares, peace will be brought to the Middle East, Iran will be pacified, every American will have health insurance, poverty will be eliminated and utopia will have arrived.

Sorry to be a party pooper but I’m afraid I must register a small note of dissent. It’s not just that people have projected onto the person of Obama expectations that – especially given the world financial crisis – cannot possibly be met.

I think that the desperate dangerousness and complexity of our world and a profound terror of what properly facing up to its problems would entail have led people to believe a cartoon version of why we’re in such a state – and to have invested their hopes similarly in a fantasy figure of hope, to such an extent that they have shut their ears to some very loud warning bells ringing from his past history.

People believe that Obama represents a renunciation of an America that throws its weight around the world. And they think it’s that ‘war-mongering’ characteristic, represented in particular by President Bush and the war in Iraq, which has caused so much global trouble and resentment.

I believe that’s a dangerously false analysis which fails to grasp the extent to which western civilisation is under attack from a world-wide enemy that intends to destroy it, and which further fails to distinguish between true aggression and true self-defence.

Like the hydra, the enemy now waging war on the west has many heads – but it is one enemy, and it feeds in particular on the perception that the west is weak and is no longer willing to defend itself by military means.

The very reason that so many in the west are so entranced by Obama is thus the very reason why our enemies are today rubbing their hands in satisfaction.

Obama stands for ‘soft power’ – the replacement of military action in defence of his nation by talking, negotiation and compromise. But with people who have non-negotiable and unconscionable agendas – such as Iran’s genocidal intention to wipe Israel off the map and destroy the west – such an approach merely plays into their hands while catastrophically undermining more moderate regimes and allies.

And there’s a still more troubling aspect of America’s new President. For his whole career has been solidly embedded in an ultra-radical tradition which believes in revolution from the grass-roots up – and which teaches that to gain power, an activist must pose as a centrist while pursuing his real agenda of radicalising the people and revolutionising society.

Everything Obama has done, both in pursuit of the presidency and since his election, fits that programme for radical action to the letter.

Cleverly drawing upon the little-observed fact that the appeasement-minded folk who took control in the second, terminally weakened stage of the Bush administration have an approach to the world’s conflicts which is strikingly similar to anti-war left-wingers, he has neutralised concerns about his supposed radicalism by assembling a governmental team which appears to be so centrist it is merely carrying on much as before.

A more careful look at all his appointments, particularly those in the second tier, reveals however a rather different and more troubling picture.

But that’s all for the future. Today, no-one can predict just how the Obama presidency will turn out. He may indeed be constrained not just by current difficulties but by events not yet forseen. He may change his mind about a lot of things as a result. He may on the other hand opt for expediency until an opportunity presents itself for the kind of ‘change’ he dreams of. He may even turn out to be well-intentioned but hampered by inexperience and naivety. Who knows? All we can do is watch and hope that this new President does not plunge us all into even greater peril yet.

Saul Alinsky, the immensely influential far-left ideologue who invented the role of grass-roots ‘community organiser’ that Obama filled for so many years, laid out in his book Rules for Radicals that the revolution could only be brought about by stealth politics.

This is what he wrote: ‘This is the job for today’s radical – to fan the embers of hopelessness into a flame to fight. To say, ‘You cannot turn away – look at it – let us change it together!’ ‘Look at us. We are your children. Let us not abandon each other for then we are all lost. Together we can change it for what we want…it is a job first of bringing hope and doing what every organiser must do with all people, all classes, places and times – communicate the means or tactics whereby the people can feel that they have the power to do this and that and on

‘Tactics must begin with the experience of the middle class, accepting their aversion to rudeness, vulgarity and conflict. Start them easy, don’t scare them off…Tactics such as stock proxies and others are waiting to be hurled into the attack…’

‘Change’ and ‘hope’: does that strike a chord with anyone?

On the far side of the world, Gerard Henderson, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, looks at President Obama’s prospects.

Come tomorrow there will be reason to add an addendum to Barack Obama’s election cry “Yes we can”. It will consist of four words: “But not just yet”. In his victory speech in Chicago on November 4, after declaring that “change has come to America”, the president-elect declared the yes-we-can mantra on no fewer than seven occasions. However, in the lead-up to his inauguration, Obama has been keen to get across the message that change will take time.

. . .

Seldom before in the past half century have there been such expectations about the possibility of renewal and reform in a Western democracy. In the US expectations were high during the early 1960s about President John F. Kennedy but these were soon dented by the harsh realities of foreign and domestic politics. In the end the Kennedy-as-Camelot myth prevailed as the unintended consequence of JFK’s assassination.

It seems that in democratic societies social democrats, rather than political conservatives, are likely to be charismatic types. After Kennedy and before Obama there was Britain’s Tony Blair and his New Labour brand. The satirical magazine Private Eye was one of the few left-of-centre entities to predict what was to come. It welcomed Blair’s election with a cover that declared “New Labour: New Jokes”. And so it turned out to be – even though, like Bush, Blair has had an exceptionally hard and at times unfair press.

As a general rule, charismatic leaders do not prevail for long in democracies since, by their very nature, such societies are sceptical and irreverent. In Australia only Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating exhibited charisma as prime minister and both suffered massive defeats within a few years of obtaining office.

Obama is the most charismatic politician of his generation. He is highly articulate with Hollywood good looks and the build of an athlete. Consequently, he may remain popular for a long time. Even so, it seems unlikely that he can deliver on the high expectations which are held of him, particularly by those yes-we-can Americans who voted for, and now expect, change.

There are certain ingrained US attitudes concerning national security and foreign policy which tend to prevail, irrespective of who occupies the Oval Office. Also, there are constraints on what a US president can do on economic policy, even if there is a supportive Congress.

Judged on what he has said so far, Obama’s economic plan appears to enhance the Bush administration’s decisions which were made after the onset of the global financial crisis.

. . .

Only the naive believe that democratic government is easy and that change can invariably be implemented without consequences.

Obama’s long-term success will turn on his ability to persuade Americans that government is more difficult than a lot of people realise.

A whole lot more difficult! I don’t think many of the easily-voiced “Yes, we can!” promises of the campaign are likely to be translated into action anytime soon.

What scares me are the potential consequences of President Obama continuing the spendthrift, debt-ridden ‘bailout’ policies of the previous Congress and Administration. They’re nothing more or less than a recipe for disaster. It’s a fundamental rule of economics that you simply can’t spend what you don’t have – and if you borrow what you don’t have in order to spend it, sooner or later, the bills must be paid. This means either beggaring the taxpayers of the future – our children – to do so, or deliberately engineering and embracing massive inflation, so that debts can be repaid with devalued currency. Either prospect is abhorrent: but one or the other is bound to happen (perhaps both, if we’re desperately unfortunate). It can’t be otherwise.

I find myself in reluctant agreement with Mary Ellen Synon:

Please do not ask me if I welcome the inauguration of Barack Obama. Don’t push me that far. Tomorrow is not going to be a good day.

I of course do see that Mr Obama is charming, attractive and gives stirring speeches. But he says almost nothing in his speeches, and what he does say is either dangerous or wrong.

Many people, here and in America, have been saying they hope he ‘succeeds.’ I have to join the American broadcaster Rush Limbaugh and say I hope he does not. ‘I’ve been listening to Barack Obama for a year-and-a-half,’ says Mr Limbaugh. ‘I know what his politics are. I know what his plans are, as he has stated them. I don’t want them to succeed.’

‘What he is talking about is the absorption of as much of the private sector by the US government as possible, from the banking business, to the mortgage business, to health care. I do not want the government in charge of all these things.’

Neither do I, Rushbo. The next for years are going to be ghastly. I’ll be clinging to the only comfort I have: that at least the ghastly president is not the ghastly Hillary.

Well, for better or worse, we have a new President. Let’s see how he does.

Peter