One year of Obama ... is the hope being fulfilled?

20 January 2010 marks exactly one year since President Barack Obama came into office. How has he performed? Is the enormous hope invested in him by millions of people across the world, and in Africa, being realised? We sent our New York correspondent

Ifa Kamau Cush to find out. The verdict is a "mixed bag", but Obama's devoted supporters are mightily afraid that his policies are not matching his electoral promises, and if he does not improve, it might cost him his re-election chances. However, it is too early to judge.

MANY AMERICANS WERE ECSTATIC WHEN BARACK Obama was elected president of the United States. "I have high expectations of him and his administration especially as it relates to his policies vis-a-vis Africa. The Bush policies in that regard have been so horrendous that if we did not do something to change them in a radical way, I would have been terribly disappointed," remarked Dr Howard Dodson who heads the Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York. Adelaide Sanford, who sat on the New York State Board of Regents for 21 years, was overwhelmed with joy when Obama was elected: "He will be the best president the United States has ever had," she gushed. During his campaign, Obama employed his remarkable analytical skills to convince voters that he was an agent of change; someone who would burnish America's global image, tarnished by the presidency of George W. Bush.

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In an essay published three months into the Obama presidency, author Kevin Baker wrote: "Barack Obama has proven to be every bit as charismatic and intelligent as his most ardent supporters could have hoped. At home or abroad, he invariably appears to be the only adult in the room, the first American president in at least 40 years to convey any gravitas. Even the most liberal of voters are finding it hard to believe they managed to elect this man to be their president."

Yes, Americans celebrated Obama's election because they believed the promises he made: to change the country's unjust and inadequate health-care system, end the war in Iraq, close the Guantanamo gulag, create jobs, and reset America's relations with the global community. One year later, how is he doing? "It is a mixed bag," according to Dr Gerald Horne, professor of history at the University of Houston, and author of Mau Mau in Harlem? The US and the Liberation of Kenya.

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"Given the potency of conservatism [in the US] and the scale of the problems," Dr Home says, "Obama has made significant progress on women's rights and initiatives on the environment, health and education." However, while Home praises Obama's domestic initiatives, he is critical of some of his foreign policy positions, citing the president's intransigence on Zimbabwe and his equivocation on Israeli settlements.

According to Dr Home, Obama's extension of US legislation last March prohibiting the IMF and the World Bank from providing loans, loan guarantees and lines of credit to Zimbabwe's government--thus, preventing that country from upgrading and improving its health care and sanitation infrastructure--was particularly egregious because it was that same piece of legislation that exacerbated Zimbabwe's cholera epidemic in 2008, which killed over 4,000 people, mainly children and the elderly.

Dr George Bisharat, of the Hastings College of Law, University of California, attributes Obama's foreign policy faux pas to the challenges he is facing domestically. "President Obama started fast out of the gate on the foreign policy front; then, he faltered considerably," says Dr Bisharat. "This is not coincidental, as the economy and health care moved to centre stage and demanded more and more of his time, energy, and political capital. In the manner of all American presidents, domestic policy comes first, and so it is with President Obama."

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Bisharat concedes that Obama took some positive steps "in the Middle East ... in his initial insistence on a freeze on Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. However, his administration's backpedalling on the settlements freeze has been very damaging to the president's standing in the region, and has renewed distrust in the ability or willingness of the US government to effectively curb Israeli misconduct. We stand, now, at the lowest ebb in prospects for a negotiated solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993."

Angry workers

Not everyone is as sanguine about Obama's domestic initiatives as Dr Home and Dr Bisharat. Dr William K. Black, associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, is convinced that Obama's initiatives for the US economy will worsen conditions for America's workers. Dr Black, a former litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, is convinced that the US will experience recurring recessions in the coming years. "I think his [Obama's] senior economic team is the weakest link in his administration," Dr Black argues. "I believe they are creating conditions that will send the US into rolling recessions and weak recoveries and greatly increase the risk of a new, global financial crisis."

According to Dr Black, unemployment levels in the United States will continue to rise for the next "several months" because the so-called economic recovery is exhibiting weak job growth. He thinks Obama's officials seem unconcerned about the weak job growth in the US economy, explaining it away as a "lagging indicator" that will catch up with an expanding economy. But Dr Black disagrees: "The administration's dismissal of the unemployed as lagging indicators' has angered many Americans. The political tone-deafness indicates that the administration's political arm has lost the internal struggle with the economic arm," Black added, referring to Larry Summers, the director of Obama's National Economic Council, and Timothy Geithner, Obama's treasury secretary, who many hold responsible for the global financial meltdown.

But not all commentators are as restrained as Dr Black. Tom Eley, a social critic, commenting on Obama's only major speech so far on Black America, given at the 100th anniversary of NAACP in New York on 17 July 2009 (see p. 18), was more scathing of Obama's perceived insensitivity to the working class. "Over the past four decades," Eley wrote on 18 July 2009, "social inequality within the black population has increased enormously. Obama is the outcome of this process. There is nothing in Obama's personal or political history that has anything to do with the struggles of African-American workers. He was very early on picked up by powerful political and financial interests that ultimately shepherded him to the White House. Because of his particular ethnic background, he was seen as someone who could better sell right-wing policies."

Eley went on: "Far from advancing the interests of the majority of the black population, identity politics has become the vehicle for a sharp attack on African-American workers and the working class as a whole. While his administration has handed over upwards of $12 trillion to the big finance houses, Obama has manipulated the bankruptcy of the auto industry in order to drive down the wages and living standards of the working class.

"He has proposed health care reform that would result in a system of compulsory insurance and rationed treatment. On education--which in his speech he held up as the basic necessity for advancement--Obama is supporting the shutdown of public schools, the expansion of charter schools and an attack on teachers. Obama's speech, and the entire content of the policy of his administration, only proves that the fundamental division in society is class, not race."

Iraq, Afghanistan

The continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are another cause for concern for many Americans. In an open letter to Obama, former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, writing on behalf of DIGNITY, an American human rights organisation, said: "We supported your candidacy because we viewed you as the best chance for ending the wars of the Bush era. We applauded your rejection of the rhetoric of fear and division that was the stock-in-trade of Bush and Cheney."

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McKinney warned Obama in her letter that "if you opt for a wider war, the resulting heavy casualties will destroy confidence in your leadership among your most devoted advocates. Hundreds of billions of dollars will be poured down a rathole and will no longer be available for any reform and renovation of American society." She then asked: "Will you be a great progressive president or will you prove too weak to turn away from the bankrupt policies institutionalised and entrenched under Bush and Cheney?"

Obama's dismissive riposte? A surge of 30,000 more American troops for Afghanistan, announced on 1 December--at a cost to American taxpayers of $3obn more every year, enough money to provide health care for over 3.6 million Americans annually, according to economists. Obama's similitude of policy with his predecessor, George W. Bush, is not limited to the Middle East and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For Africa, Obama's simpatico with George Bush is astoundingly worrisome. During his trip to Ghana last July, Obama displayed incredible fatuity when, in his address to Ghana's parliament, he seemed to diminish the horrors of the European enslavement of Africans while absolving the former American and European slave-holding and colonial governments of their crimes against Africa and the African people. "Now it's easy to point fingers and pin the blame of these problems [Africa's] on others. Yes, a colonial map that made little sense helped to breed conflict," Obama noted, dismissively.

Then, to compound his betise, Obama told CNN's Anderson Cooper, during his tour of the dungeons at the Cape Coast Castle where enslaved Africans were stacked before their journey across the Atlantic, that "the experience of slavery is like the experience of the Holocaust", referring to the Nazi extermination of six million European Jews between 1939 and 1944 and demonstrating an embarrassing lack of his sense of proportion given that some 100 million Africans were exterminated during the slave trade, which lasted nearly 400 years!

To make matters worse, Obama compared the conflicts in Darfur and DRCongo with the slave trade, which prompted Dr Horne to remark that the president's comparison was a "rhetorical embellishment and shameless pandering to the basest instincts in the North Atlantic community".

Obama's reference to the Congo conflict failed to examine the genesis of that bloodletting, which began in 1885 when the US government, under President Grover Cleveland, formally recognised the authority of King Leopold II of Belgium to exert total control over the huge country, which is as large as Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, Armenia and Albania put together.

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President Cleveland wrote, extolling the Belgian king on II September 1885 -- a date that will live in infamy in America's history: "This government at the outset testified its lively interest in the well-being and future progress of the vast region now committed to your Majesty's wise care, by being the first among the powers to recognise the flag of the International Association of the Congo as that of a friendly state."

Between 1885 and 1905, King Leopold's agents exterminated 10 million black people in Congo. Throughout this period, the great powers of the time, including the US and Germany, "constituted themselves as guardians of the people of the Congo territory", according to Mark Twain in his book, King Leopold's Soliloquy. During Leopold's genocidal project, American and European businesses reaped massive profits from the rubber that the Belgian king's African victims were forced to extract.

Pragmatism in Sudan

Dr Mahmood Mamdani, author of Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror, and professor of government at Columbia University in New York, however, believes that Obama has improved America's standing in one part of Africa: Sudan. "Obama's major achievement has been to rethink the politics and consequences of human rights interventions and return to the main objective in conflict situations, which is to end the conflict," he says. "This has made it possible for his administration to relocate criminal issues in their political context. The best illustration of this is the work done by his envoy to Sudan, Gen. Scott Gration."

Mamdani adds: "The most important thing Scott Gration has done is to move away from the ideologically-driven demand of the Save Darfur lobby, expressed in the language of 'genocide', to an interest-driven articulation of US policy. The basic difference is that an ideologically-driven policy had made it difficult to talk to a regime branded as genocidal, whereas an interest-driven policy required talking to the regime.

"The difference was clear in how the US had approached South Sudan--where the language of genocide had not been used, in spite of the fact that the war in the south had lasted a longer period and cost many more civilian lives than in Darfur. General Gration made two demands: one, that the US talk to Khartoum and, two, that the US develop a single integrated policy for Sudan and not a separate policy for the south and another for Darfur."

Many analysts believe that Obama's new, pragmatic approach to the Sudan is driven by America's desire to counter the rising influence of China in Sudan's oil industry. Obama's "devoted advocates," to whom Cynthia McKinney referred, are aghast at the divergence in the president's campaign promises and his policies.

Gideon Rose, managing editor of Foreign Affairs, a publication of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), is not surprised at the divergence. According to him, Obama's African blood "gives rise to expectations that America will do something significantly different than it has been doing, when in practice he is an American president first and foremost." Rose, who is also a former associate director for Near East and South Asian Affairs on the National Security Council, added that Obama is "no different from Bush except in the language he uses. People who think of Obama as some crazy lefty are idiots!" Rose declared.

President Obama's Africa policy is directed by Michelle D. Gavin, who was an international affairs fellow at the CFR and is now Obama's special assistant and senior director for African Affairs. Gavin wrote a CFR report on Zimbabwe in 2007 entitled "Planning for Post-Mugabe Zimbabwe". It read like a primer for American interference in Zimbabwe's affairs.

In explaining the striking similarities between the Obama and Bush presidencies, Gideon Rose points out that Obama "is not somebody who is elected to office to end American dominance". According to him, Obama represents American foreign policy with a "human face", and his role is to "translate American material advantage into legitimate American leadership".

It is precisely for that reason that author Kevin Baker believes that the Obama presidency will fail. In his knee-jerk urge to maintain America's global dominance, Barker says Obama will "refuse to seize the radical moment at hand" and usher in the changes he promised during the election campaign.

In her letter to Obama, Cynthia McKinney urged him to "act in the spirit of your 2008 campaign--the spirit of hope and change, neither of which can survive the continuation or expansion of the hopeless Afghan war".

One year into Obama's presidency, many worried analysts say he seems to be moving, inexorably, in a direction that portends disaster for him and his fellow Democrats at the polls in 2010 and 2012. McKinney said as much in her letter: "We will support anti-war candidates of any party in the 2010 elections. [And], if you are still waging the Afghan war in 2011, we will be forced to seriously consider backing an explicitly anti-war primary candidate to challenge you during the Democratic primaries."

The first year is already gone. Perhaps Obama will listen and change course for the better in the second year. This is the prayer of his devoted supporters, in Africa, America and beyond.

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Title Annotation:	Barack Obama
Publication:	New African
Geographic Code:	1USA
Date:	Jan 1, 2010
Words:	2629
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Topics:	Political leadership Management

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