What Obama needs to do in his second term

If Obama wishes for legacy, he will have to regress from his Left philosophical base to a more centrist political one.

There is only one way to explain Barack Obama’s first tenure as president: a Black man’s burden! Exceptional of mind, with his heart in the right place, he knew exactly what to do immediately after his inauguration — plug the leaks through which poured trillions that raised the mountain of debt; the biggest of them, the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that had together swallowed five trillion dollars. He had promised to close down in Iraq, and he did. But he could not bring himself to close the other war, in Afghanistan; that was his burden. He could not be seen as a wimp, especially since he had just broken a glass ceiling as a man of colour. Hyped as a civilisational war against Islamic terror under Bush’s neo-con years, he had to play along to prove his credentials as a genuine American. That in the last four years alone has cost him and America another five trillion dollars in additional debt.

Yet, with an economy in tatters and a depression barely averted, he is back for another term. Perhaps, Mitt Romney will forever rue the greatest opportunity to win back the crown from a man who was unsure of his standing after having been literally boxed in by the baggage of his predecessor, accentuated further by the dynamics of antecedence and the burden of race. His inability to take just another step to break himself free from another bedeviling war to pursue his own agenda of socio-economic development thus lay largely unattended. A fractious political system with a Republican-controlled House of Representatives meant that legislation in pursuit of his social agenda was callously denied. Obama’s flagship healthcare plan could only survive with a Supreme Court injunction. Virtual paralysis in government meant Obama failed to change much despite change being his rallying call.

In his second term as president, all this will need to change to make possible for him to pursue his development agenda for the middle class that he so dearly espouses. To that end, he will still need to work with a Republican-dominated Congress and create money to wash the fiscal deficit, find resources to fund his socio-economic programmes, and somehow rejuvenate the economy after the slowest recovery in recent US history. He will have to regress from his rather Left philosophical base to a more centrist political base in order to appear amenable to a similarly polarised Right of the Republican Party. If Obama wishes for a legacy, this will need to be it — his move back to the Centre so that he could work with a divided Congress.

Will he be only a president seeking to leave behind a legacy on a domestic agenda alone? Or, will he also like to leave his mark on the international platform? Perhaps, both will play in his last tenure. Remember, the Obama who gave his victory speech on November 6 was a different Obama from the one who had gone about listlessly as the president in the second half of his first tenure. He spoke with verve and commitment, and carried the same spark in his eyes that people saw in him in 2004 when he gave a keynote speech at the Democratic Convention. He suddenly appeared more confident, more reassured, and more purposeful. He seems to have rediscovered himself.

What then about his external agenda? To keep harmony with the political Right in pursuit of his domestic agenda, whether economy, jobs or his healthcare plan, he is unlikely to pursue policies abroad that will ruffle feathers at home. And this will mean, finding some workable accommodation with Israel. Do not expect then any serious initiative by the second Obama Administration on the Israel-Palestine issue. At the same time, expect an increased pressure on Iran through economic and diplomatic strangulation to keep it from crossing the threshold on nuclear enrichment. This will be a tough balancing act if Benjamin Netanyahu re-emerges with a fresh mandate for another term and considers armed intervention a must to stop Iran’s nuclear ambition. Part legacy of Obama on the international plane might include keeping a war out of Iran, including keeping out the US from one. His loudest claim in his victory speech was the end of the decade of war!

What about Pakistan? Pakistan just might find itself re-emerging from the hyphenated Af-Pak as an entity by itself worthy of undiluted American attention. A diminishing centrality of Afghanistan in America’s foreign policy focus will mean dealing with Pakistan on its own merit, good or bad. There are signs that a more matured administration led by a seasoned Obama in his second term will, after all, realise the futility of pushing Pakistan to ‘do more’ and develop a more stable relationship away from the prism of Afghanistan. With the US military involvement in Afghanistan now certain to come to an end, it is likely that use of drones, too, will peter out in Pakistan’s tribal regions; it will also depend on how quickly all sides can engage the Taliban in a reconciliation process, thus implicitly bringing hostilities to cease. This too will gradually obviate the more sticking aspects of the US-Pakistan relationship creating space for a more productive relationship.

In an America that is likely to have restricted space abroad because of domestic political compulsions, President Obama will have to work hard to find something of significance to create his own Dayton moment like Clinton. Unless, of course, the US can manage another ‘Spring’, this time in Israel, by replacing Netanyahu with a less aggressive option. Then, Palestine statehood just might become that moment for President Obama. The other option for him would be to perhaps find progress on some of the long-delayed disarmament issues such as the ratification of the CTBT and a conclusion of the FMCT. With his dependence on the Republican Right to work at home, he just might find these too elusive.

Keeping the world out of another war in the next four years might then be the more probable Obama legacy. Along with jobs at home, of course. Remember, he already has a Nobel for peace that he will do well to justify. Not bad, for a man of colour.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 15^th, 2012.