Barack Obama, the worst. He gave his fans everything they wanted, yet America despises him. Here because
It has favored economic recovery, withdrawal from the war fronts, LGBT egalitarianism. Just as his constituents were asking. Yet he is considered the worst president since the war. There is an explanation
Americans are pragmatic. They judge by the results. They move for money and other measurable benefits. Efficiency is for them the supreme criterion of choice, the calculation between costs and benefits is an art that has been refined over time. They appreciate the resounding results, the certainty of the statistics, they don't play too much with ideological standpoints, good philosophical smoke for the fluttering European minds stuck in some other century. They prefer histograms to manifestos of intent; they don't care about appearances and get to the point. They make decisions based on data, not on unduly universalized beliefs, and do not have traditional ideas solid enough that they cannot be replaced as needed by more functional surrogates. One could go on for hours to expand the anthology of clichés around the legend of American pragmatism. Then you take a look at the relationship between a president's political achievements and his popularity and all the clichés immediately melt away.
The strange case of Barack Obama is exemplary in this sense: in his six years of presidency America has emerged from a recession that certainly was not attributable to the president, the economy has slowly but steadily recovered, jobs have revised, the stock market reached all-time highs; Obama has closed a war front, the Iraqi one, and is about to bring his boys home from Afghanistan, he has carefully avoided putting his hands in any hypothesis of conflict that arises, he has cut short with the history of America global policeman, let alone that of George W. Bush's empire of good fighting the axis of evil. He made international disengagement and domestic pragmatism a philosophy of governance and life. He gave America health care reform that goes in the direction of European-style universal coverage, raised taxes on the rich as much as he could, the worms that dug into capitalism's buggy apple, beat up bankers and promoted a reform of the financial system that it should act as a barrier against future storms.
He did not sign a law in favor of gay marriage, but more cunningly endorsed the spirit in pectore, merely "evolving" in his marriage convictions while the jurisprudence machine was bouncing appeals up to the Supreme Court. The president on the LGBT battle did not put his autograph on it but he put his hat on it, and it is no small matter in a dispute that has grown in the Lincolnian channel of civil rights to be conquered, a postmodern figure of the spirit of abolitionism. In short, Obama has done much of what, according to the well-informed, the Americans were asking as one man at the end of the Bush presidency. Yet popularity polls relegate Obama to the bottom of the post-World War II ranking of US presidents.
A Quinnipac University poll (see below) says 33 percent of Americans think Obama is the worst president in sixty years, even worse than his much-hated predecessor, standing at 28 percent, far worse than the infinitely deplorable. Richard Nixon and the awkward Jimmy Carter. To make the perception even more bitter for Obama, the poll reveals that the most loved of presidents since Truman is none other than Ronald Reagan, more revered than Obama is hated (35 percent). John Fitzgerald Kennedy is more detached in the ranking, with 15 percent of the votes.
Following the spirit of the time
Obama gave the people what the people asked, always according to the well-informed, he guided or supported - depending on the circumstances - the Zeitgeist, with all the flaws and shortcomings that necessarily incur those who tinker with extra-mental reality, but everything all in all, his government went in the direction it proposed. Why then is the popular judgment so merciless? Why does what CNN calls "Obama disconnect" emerge, the asymmetry between the many proofs that Obama could theoretically exhibit to his advantage and the widespread unpopularity that instead emerged?
Federico Rampini in Repubblica concludes a detailed analysis of the phenomenon, suggesting in one line that the fault lies with capitalism: the economy will also be recovering, but if it is always and only the rich who starve the middle class who get rich beyond measure - and it could not be otherwise, because capitalism was born with the syndrome of inequality, as Thomas Piketty says in a book that everyone has bought and no one has read - what's the fun of growing up? In short, Obama should turn the system upside down like a sock, inaugurate a new social and economic paradigm, so that the foundations could be laid for a new coexistence. And maybe the polls would smile again.
The beautiful visions of the past
The fair judgment on presidential work usually comes along with historical distance, but the "Obama disconnect" already contains useful interpretative keys in the present. First of all, it dismantles the idea of pragmatism and technocratic functionalism as the dominant vector of the political perception of Americans. Reagan certainly made perimeter political contributions, and in these times of inconclusive political polarization, as they say, another sure-fire cliché is nostalgically evoking the good old days when Reagan and Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill they made reasonable political compromises over a drink. Reagan's electoral battles before grabbing the White House, mounted on a libertarian political platform that by comparison, today's Tea Party seem a jumble of masked figures, are just a thread less cited, because in the vulgate an acute allergy to idea that political proposals of an identity nature can have a hold on the people.
Reagan remained engraved in the hearts of Americans because he aspired to interpret an ideal. On taxes, the role of the state, family, life, economic growth, the relationship between the public and private sectors, public spending, debt, foreign policy, America's role in the world and so on, Reaganism drew on a basically organic conception of the world. There were tactics and compromise, indeed there were, but there was also the ideal tension, the one that warms hearts and stems the dictatorship of relativism.
A similar speech can be made in reverse for Kennedy, president who has the Bay of Pigs disaster and little else on the list of things done and who a murder that grew up in the heart of the Cold War has projected from life to legend without going through history, but it was "inspiring", as the Americans say. Lyndon Johnson, who then centered on some of the achievements that Kennedy had within, first of all civil rights for African Americans, is instead remembered without warmth and indeed with a hint of suspicion for his oblique and Texan way of negotiating around anything. Bush's world was instead the triumph of "moral clarity".
The downgraded homeland
If America really preferred the cold problem solver to the charismatic, even apocalyptic leader - and it is valid in both a democratic and republican sense - two years ago it would have voted hands down Mitt Romney, who had the wallet, the mentality, the physique du rôle and the fake and efficient smile of the CEO of the nation to be restored. He could have done a perfect due diligence and a new business plan. Obama was weak at that point, but he was still "inspiring". And America is still the "project of modernity", as the historian Stanley Hauerwas says, the only experiment both liberal and puritanical that does not arise from opposition with a previous culture but interprets its vocation in an assertive sense, and this experiment does not can only feed on ideals. Presidents who renounce them are condemned to a seraphic oblivion, those who evoke them and then abandon them, subjecting them to the logic of convenience, earn active contempt.
The penalty in question is precisely the "disconnect", the disconnect between conquests and perception, between the ideal and its effective interpretation. America apparently wanted nothing more than economic recovery, an end to wars and the triumph of egalitarian ideology in terms of gender and couple, and from Obama it has achieved tangible results in this regard. But he didn't see the ideal force the commander-in-chief promised to move. It has seen a disjointed congeries of calculations, a lot of cabotage, isolationism disguised as "nation building at home", the myth of the reconstruction of the homeland after the passage of the Bush Hun, has seen its own country and its ideals retreat behind the scenes of an order multipolar world, with America downgraded from a "city on the hill" to which all nations look to power among the powers. And at least a piece of America has seen those social and cultural forms that were an integral part of the way people conceived and interpreted themselves vanish or become meaningless.
The restlessness of the new era
Obama can be considered the bankruptcy trustee of American "culture wars" on sexuality, family and other neighboring conflicts treated as a matter of civil rights, therefore a self-evident truth confirmed by the letter of the Constitution, but this cannot fail to generate concern. in a people that still does not appear ready for the perfect and simultaneous cerebral flattening on the dictates of liberal culture. The polls that want him to be the worst American president since the war, in spite of the "accomplishments" to be exhibited as a synthesis of a new era, are nothing more than a reflection of the disquiet from Obama's disconnection.
