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Barack Obama - Source: Reuters -
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During last year's presidential primaries I supported Hillary Clinton's candidacy.
My support had its origins in my decade-long, ever-deepening cynicism about US politics. I'd convinced myself that a Democratic candidate simply had to win to allow America to change its course from the ruinous path George W Bush's policies had steered it. So far so good.
Yet I had no affinity for Hillary, none whatsoever, because in the 1990s I studied her health care reform effort and understood from that unbelievable fiasco that Bubba possessed all the family's political intuition, if none of its discipline. I also strongly felt that America would benefit from having as its next president a person whose surname was neither Bush nor Clinton.
Yet such was my pessimism that I put aside these doubts to convince myself that come what may, only the Clinton machine would be able to win Ohio by one vote, if that's what it took, to beat whichever candidate the Republicans conjured up.
I was wrong, on so many levels.
The Clinton political machine lacked strategic and tactical nous, right from the get go; the Iowa caucuses. The absence of a caucus strategy was a huge bungle from the Clinton campaign. Forced onto the defensive after Obama's early successes, their message kept changing, from magisterial procession to whiskey-shot slurping friend of gun-tooting poor whites. It was all a bit absurd.
The Clinton campaign seriously underestimated the abilities of their primary opponent, Barack Obama. His insurgent campaign out-thought the Clintonistas at every turn. His message of change matched the public mood, and what a messenger he was. Obama's ability to put an electric charge into his audiences was as breath-taking as it was rare.
So, I was slow to embrace candidate Obama. His long primary speeches used to drive me insane, as friends and colleagues gathered round television sets with me during the primaries would attest. It all sounded like an endless loop of Bible-speak to me, and it drove me to distraction.
I thought the Republicans would tear him apart (duh, wrong again) although they certainly tried. Yet I came round and by the time Palin was selected as McCain's running mate I knew then that Barack Obama, an amazing political phenomenon, was going to win.
I'd never been so happy to be proven wrong, so stood there unashamedly bawling during his Victory Park speech in Chicago, my cynicism replaced with joy and optimism, for history was being forged in front of my eyes and America's deepest stain cleansed, if only for one magnificent day, but with the promise of more.
Reality, in the form of two wars and one global economic calamity, has now set in, so one year into his presidency what can we say about the president and his performance?
The polls would tell us that his approval rating has steadily eroded, that the American public has grown more critical of him as the economy has shed jobs and caused widespread insecurity from coast to coast.
His liberal supporters would tell us Obama hasn't done enough, that he hasn't delivered on his campaign promises; not enough for gays, not enough for the poor, not enough to get America out of Afghanistan.
His partisan critics would tell us that he is leading America towards an incipient socialism; 'No He Can't' is their cry.
And I would tell you that the seeds of a great presidency can be glimpsed, that this president has the purpose, temperament and judgement that America sorely needs from its leader given the myriad and complex problems it's facing at home and abroad.
This doesn't say that Obama will prove one of America's greatest presidents, far from it - for this president is embedded in an institutional and constitutional set of arrangements that is hopelessly entropic - but I do say that the raw material, the potential is there to shape future history.
Obama is proving to be a calmly rational individual. This is reflected in his decision-making and manifested in his speeches. He has ''chid histruantyouth" to emerge as a realist in foreign affairs, frequently citing Bush the Elder as his lodestar.
He thus accepts the world as it is, a welcome relief from the younger Bush's determination to force the world to live in America's (imperfect) image. Obama's Afghanistan troop decision defined limits, set milestones and an exit strategy; all within a much tighter strategic framework than he inherited. Obama's War is thus far more influenced by the Powell Doctrine than Bush's pre-emption madness, and his speech was designed to shore up public support behind it. Early signs show a modicum of promise.
Obama's "open door" offer to Iran, Russia, and any who choose to walk through it underpins an expansive idea of security and mutual interest. But the president also sees reducing global tensions as a necessary condition for his main focus, which is security and prosperity at home. His domestic agenda was arguably far too ambitious given Bush's policy inheritance and the economic crisis conditions he met, and he is learning how difficult it is for any president, even one with his emphatic mandate to effect change, to move significant policy reform through the meat grinder that is the anachronistic US senate.
He gave his vanquished opponents every opportunity to answer the public's call for bi-partisanship, to join him as a constructive force for the greater public good. The Republicans rejected him.
He gave the legislature the space to fashion a response to the country's greatest policy dilemma, health care. Their response is in the balance.
Obama's is, therefore, a presidency on knife's edge of first year failure, or historic success, but whatever the outcome, Obama, I believe, has the strategic advantage at every turn bar one, the ability of the national economy to produce jobs and growth by 2012.
Those who see politics in the daily battle amidst the trees will tell you otherwise, but here's a prediction for 2012: Obama will decimate his Republican opponent. It won't even be close. I'm conscious, of course, that this prediction is being made in defiance of all the current known facts and by a correspondent who began this piece by admitting his fallibility.
But after spending five months observing Obama's leadership at close quarters my optimism remains; this president can.
