Obama's America- the Gordon Brown years?

The 2008 election campaign filled me with an eerie sense of déjà vu, as I suspect it did many British people living in America. The hysterical reception accorded Barack Obama was strongly reminiscent of the frothing enthusiasm for Tony Blair in 1997.

Obama had a more inspiring biography than Tony Blair of course and did sincerity better; nevertheless there were many parallels. Both were relatively young, charismatic men who insistently repeated stirring but vague mantras about change and a coming new era to an exhausted electorate craving a break with the recent past. Both surrounded themselves with pop stars and other glamorous types, in an attempt to identify with everything that was young and progressive and hip. Of course, this being America, Obama operated on a much grander, messianic scale: Blair never implied that his victory might lower the earth’s water levels for example, and nor did anybody ever faint at his rallies as if he were a faith healer. However when Blair won the election the sympathetic Guardian newspaper did get rather overheated: I recall an article in which the atmosphere in the UK was compared to the relief felt at the end of World War II, thus equating the hapless John Major with Adolph Hitler. That total absence of proportion will sound familiar to anyone who has flicked through the People’s Temple style newsletter that is Newsweek or spent a few minutes watching the risible MSNBC. (In the Guardian’s defence however, none of its writers were ever so feeble-minded as to compare Blair to God.)

Anyway, during the election campaign I would say to those who asked for my thoughts on the Obama phenomenon that perhaps it wasn’t wise for so many people to allow themselves to be so carried away. Obama was only a man; worse still a politician; and even worse- not a very experienced one. I would then suggest that many Americans were setting themselves up for a massive disappointment: that the impossible expectations that Obama and his devotees had aroused would ultimately lead to profound disillusionment, leaving people even more cynical and embittered than if they had never been thus misled. Tony Blair’s career in Britain offered a shining example of this process in action. My listeners would then change the subject and never mention Obama to me again. I understood: they wanted to believe, they were protecting their faith.

Meanwhile I had a sinking suspicion that having evaded the Blair era in the UK (I was in Moscow, enjoying the regime of Vladimir Putin) I was about to experience the big budget American remake under Mr. Obama. Of course, it was never going to be an exact fit: Britain and America have different political systems, different histories and different cultures even if we speak (roughly) the same language. Yet peering through Obama’s cloud of lofty rhetoric I seemed to see a lot that was familiar. Like Blair, Obama was obsessed with his representation in the media and excessively keen to be perceived as cool and trendy. Like Blair, he was enthusiastic for a massive expansion of government, for the promotion of relatively unaccountable unelected officials into influential positions, for the incurring of massive debt to pay for his grand schemes, for promoting people with backgrounds in campus radicalism, and for great globs of toweringly ambitious but apparently half-baked reform.

The comparison was not perfect of course. Thankfully Obama showed no enthusiasm for several of Mr. Blair’s more notorious outrages, such as establishing a new criminal offence for every day he was in office, or transforming Britain into a paranoid, surveillance society. Nor did he speak of ‘Democracy’ in the same dreamy way as Blair, as if it was a metaphysical force for good in itself. Post- Iraq, Obama prefers sovereignty, including the sovereignty of scumbags. Still, Britain 1997- 2007 seemed like a reasonable rule of thumb for some of the president’s agenda at least.

Recently however I’ve started to think I may have been wrong. You see, Blair, for all his faults, got things done. He cracked skulls and enforced rigid party discipline. Armed with an overwhelming parliamentary majority and faced with an opposition in total disarray, he seized the moment to ram through reams of legislation. Obama on the other hand seems unable to achieve much of anything, as even SNL has noticed, while his party is impressively undisciplined. The absurd stimulus package, so obviously stuffed with un-stimulating pet projects was an embarrassment. Then there is the ongoing civil war between elements of the administration and the CIA; and the endless shenanigans over health care etc. It is starting to look as though Obama has little control over his own party, and that its hierarchy does not necessarily respect him. Every major initiative he sets out to pursue seems to degenerate into chaos.

However, it was as I was watching Obama make his pitch for Chicago before the IOC in Copenhagen that I knew I definitely had the wrong analogy. After all, Blair won the Olympic Games for London when everybody thought the city was going to lose. Obama, on the other hand, not only lost but made himself look ridiculous in the process- the most powerful man in the world come as a supplicant before the crooks of the IOC, only to be slapped down.

Perhaps we aren’t about to live through a remake of the Blair years after all. Blair is a winner, you see- even now many think he may live again as first president of the EU. Obama on the other hand, well… he used to look like a winner, but increasingly- not so much. Could it be then that the USA has fast forwarded to what followed Blair? Maybe there will be no period of hope giving way to gradual disillusionment, no period of furious reform collapsing into widespread cynicism. Maybe instead we’re going straight to the catastrophic aftermath- courtesy of a man with big dreams promoted beyond the level of his competence, besieged on all sides by disaster, unable to effect anything. Is Barack Obama actually America’s Gordon Brown? I hope not- for all our sakes.