Storm clouds gathering

With Hurricane Sandy giving Barack Obama a boost in the polls - partly due to nations rallying to the leader in times of crisis, partly due to the president’s deft touch - rabid Republicans are getting their excuses in early about why Obama will win but ‘deserves’ to lose. After I was quietly optimistic about a John Kerry victory in 2004 (and that turned on one county in one state – of course in Ohio), I’m not making any predictions, tucking away any optimism until that part of election night when California declares (a state with a large Republican hinterland). I’m not saying that the incumbent is the best post-World War Two president and he has made slips, but we’re all human and I would to see the Obama-haters go keening into the night should he triumph (I, on the other hand, will be disappointed but not overly perturbed if Romney wins). In reality, the rabid right-wing would have been frothing at the mouth had it been Hillary Clinton at the head of the ticket, the bile and scorn they have for Obama in the same measure as they reserved for Hillary’s husband. Unable to explain Bill’s 1996 victory, their confusion turned to rage. So incapable of writing even a slightly slanted bias against Clinton, they had to employ a British writer to be sarcastic when the Wall Street Journal produced a history of US presidents.


Robert Dallek was one of only two contributors to that book who played down right-wing ideology to give a largely balanced assessment of their selected chief executive (ironically both accounts were of Democrat presidents – Truman and Johnson). His view of Obama is that in Congress, he has faced the most vitriolic opposition of any president in living memory. His enemies refuse to play ball in Congress and then accuse him of not being bipartisan! Obamacare’s passage was so fraught because he had to rely solely on his own party, plenty of whom were far from happy with it. Since the elections of 2010 and the loss of the House, the Tea Party has a large enough slice of the representatives to capture the Republicans – a movement which believes all government is bad and so their mission in government is to obstruct it; if this means an Amerian default on its debts, so be it. You can’t negotiate with such fanatics.

Obama has done what Rudy Giuliani did on 9/11, show himself authoritative and available. It would have perfectly reasonable to crisis manage the situation from The White House, like a spider at the entre of a web, as Emperor Antoninus Pius did in his day for a whole reign. But it gladdens the hearts of those suffering if the guy at top at least gives off an air that he cares. Giuliani’s performance was quite dangerous as the scale of the terrorist threat had not been assessed at that point, partly because the anti-terrorist building was at Ground Zero. How was he to know if a suicide bomber would throw themselves at the mayor? Yet his display sealed his image as a no-nonsense politician, who for the first time became loved by New Yorkers. Obama has that chance now.