Obama is doomed to be the new Jimmy Carter

Mishaal al Gergawi

• Last Updated: November 06. 2008 10:05PM UAE / November 6. 2008 6:05PM GMT

I rooted for Team Obama from early in his campaign for the presidency: the message was right, the tone was right and there was a strong sense of understanding of how much the United States has strayed from its path of leadership and being a role model for the free world.

The choice was made easier by the nature of his opponent. John McCain always liked to be viewed as a centrist who could work with members of both main parties to pass specific legislation, and his experience as a veteran and on Capitol Hill always weighed heavily: but so did his age and, more important, the manner in which he conducted himself during his campaign. McCain was, in fact, an apologetic centrist – and the closer he got to November 4, the further right he tilted (although others have accused him of the exact opposite: for instance, he was criticised for leaving it too late before bringing the conservative master strategist Karl Rove into the campaign).

The choice of running mate epitomised the inner demons of each presidential candidate: Sarah Palin was McCain’s most expensive apology to the far right for his centrist legacy, and Biden would be to Obama what a consigliere is to a new, young, eager Don. I like the man’s style more than the man himself, but even if you factor in Biden’s gaffes and the plagiarism fiasco of 1987 (he used lines from a speech first made by the British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock – but don’t all politicians plagiarise?), he still compared positively with Palin.

Many Obamaddicts will discount the closeness of the popular vote, citing Obama’s remarkable Electoral College landslide victory of 364 to just 163. It’s not exactly 2000, when Al Gore lost the election despite winning the popular vote; Obama has won 52.3 per cent of that vote against McCain’s 46.4 per cent. Around 130 million Americans voted – the highest turn-out since 1960.

Let’s be clear that if the economy had not gone as badly as it did, people wouldn’t have panicked so much and reached out for big government to reorganise the national finances. Obama has made history and become the first half-white President of the United States partly because of around 100 greedy collaterised debt obligation product traders, salesmen and investment bankers spread around the world.

But it’s November 7 now and we are not discussing the validity of the electoral system, or the financial crunch: it’s settled, Obama is going to the White House on January 20.

I believe Obama will spend a lot of time travelling around the world talking about a new America that’s more in touch with its constitution and the morals of its founding fathers; I think that’s a good thing.

I believe Obama will spend time on attempting a strategic withdrawal of American soldiers from Iraq, redeploying them to Afghanistan, and engaging and – if need be – confronting Iran. I believe he will also work with Mahmoud Abbas and Tzipi Livni – or Binyamin Netanyahu – on pushing forward the Middle East peace process.

And I believe Obama will fail (as John McCain would have) in all of these attempts, not only because he is inexperienced but because these times are unforgiving: Obama’s most difficult challenge will be to manage his voters’ expectations. In the end he will go down in history as the man who achieved two great things: making America speak with a little more honesty than his predecessor did or his opponent would have done, and teaching Americans how to save and live frugally again.

Like Jimmy Carter before him in 1976, during his campaign for the presidency Obama was considered an outsider by the Washington political establishment; like Jimmy Carter and the nation’s licking of its Watergate wounds, for Obama being an outsider was an asset in terms of the Iraq war fiasco and the financial meltdown; like Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama also believes in reducing oil imports and increasing investment in renewable energy technology.

In his 1979 book The Carter Presidency and Beyond, Lawrence Shoup observes: “What Carter had that his opponents did not was the acceptance and support of elite sectors of the mass communications media. It was their favourable coverage of Carter and his campaign that gave him an edge, propelling him rocket-like to the top of the opinion polls. This helped Carter win key primary election victories, enabling him to rise from an obscure public figure to President-elect in the short space of nine months.” That could just as well have been said about Barack Obama.

Like Jimmy Carter, he will not be re-elected to office and will write a memoir about the America he campaigned for that Washington would not allow him to realise: it will be Utopian, but more than that, it will be bitter. Let’s hope the Republicans have reorganised by then, and are led a by fiscally conservative centrist as opposed to a cultural hawk such as Sarah Palin.

Mishaal al Gergawi is a graduate of the American University in Dubai and the CERAM European School of Business