Ideas@TheCentre
One year on: the Obamessiah is flawed
Mayor of London Boris Johnson is widely reported to have once exclaimed: ‘voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3!’
As ridiculous as this claim was, US President Barack Obama is finding out it may have been a more realistic election promise than the two major themes he campaigned on.
After one year in office, Obama, who rode into office on a wave of socially just evangelistic fervour, has not rewarded the faith shown in him by voters, and his approval ratings have been plummeting.
This should not be remarkable at all: part of the art of politics is keeping enough voters sufficiently happy that they keep voting for you, while also managing to effect some positive change. So it is understandable that with big and hugely complex issues facing the United States, Obama would lose some popularity.
But Obama’s problem is bigger than that. Aside from any firm policy commitments given, he campaigned on a much higher motif of hope and change.
An American university student complained on television last week that although Obama has been President a year, nothing has changed in her life or that of her parents.
Promising the intangible is rather short-sighted and politically fraught. After all, what is hope really? And what does change really mean? How much more hope do you have to feel than four years ago to vote for Obama in 2012?
The difficulty with promising something like hope is that it literally asks voters for faith. Not asking faith that the government might struggle to bring about positive policies, but faith to believe in change or hope itself.
Hope can be a great sustainer in times of trouble and adversity. But it doesn’t go very far when making implicit tradeoffs in, say, a national health care plan: between federal and state, between individual provision and caring for those who cannot do so themselves. Nor does it help design a cap and trade scheme balancing environment and economy.
The mucky realities of the very human world in which we find ourselves cannot be changed by simply saying we believe in something better, and Obama is fast discovering the drawbacks of promising the impossible and unreal.
By comparison, Boris almost looks reasonable.
Luke Malpass is a Policy Analyst at the Centre.
