President Obama - Let’s all be optimistic, but realistic

IT may be in some way comforting to accept that George W Bush’s greatest legacy were the conditions that made the impossible possible and ultimately real.

By being the least popular American president since the start of that country’s civil war almost 150 years ago; by accelerating the adoption of soft banking regulation he made a spectacular contribution to our desperate, frightening economic circumstances.

By needlessly involving America in wars, torture and the appalling, inhuman Guantanamo he pricked the conscience of a nation that, despite all its quirks and falls, aspires to honour liberty and human dignity more than most others.

By succumbing to Dick Cheney and his ruthlessness; by refusing to play America’s part in fighting climate change, President Bush made it possible for a 47-year-old professor of law, almost unheard of outside Chicago when Bush was first elected to the White House eight years ago, to become his successor.

When he is sworn in as America’s 44th president this afternoon Barrack Hussein Obama will have made the once-impossible real. Even those short few years ago, when Bush beat Al Gore, it would have been unimaginable that a black American could have been a real contender for the presidency of the world’s only superpower. If Obama had not done it, it would still be unthinkable, existing only in our dreaming imaginations.

President Obama animated his campaign by accentuating the positive, the possible, the prospect of shared ambitions realised. However, today’s reality is that he will have to manage an empire in decline.

America’s fate in the coming decades is not to swagger but to be relegated. Successfully managing relegation is as great a test of leadership as is handling expansion, but it is a different test. Though he may not yet be comfortable with the idea, the role for which he has been chosen is the management of national decline.

Though burdened with unrealistic expectation he will be the first US president to accept not the possibilities but the constraints of power. One of his great challenges will be to bring his country to a peaceful recognition of this.

President Obama faces unenviable choices about how much of what America does, and what Americans do, can be sustained. This year US national debt will jump by $2 trillion (€1.52tn): some 70% of GDP. In these circumstances the questions are: What can we cut? Where can we pull out? What can we stop doing?

But before any of that, he will have to find a way of being honest with Americans about their country’s fall from hegemony. In a nation that bristles at any suggestion that they can be beaten at anything, the depth of this challenge should not be underestimated.

“Yes we can!” was an easy sentiment to endorse. “No we can’t,” will be a far, far harder thing to say.

But that is the magic of Obama. He has convinced Americans and a great number of America’s friends that, despite everything, despite Gaza and the economic nightmare, that he can and that he will.

This, in a minor but quirky coincidence, is the feast of St Sebastian, who was long ago martyred for his Christian beliefs.

How sad it would be if the great, moving humanity, that inspiring and enriching idealism, that emotional calm and uplifting optimism that carried Obama to the White House were to be martyred to the cynicism and growing fears of today. Therein lies this afternoon’s great, energising joy.

It is now possible to believe that they will not.