Archives for April 2009

New Orleans was where the Bush presidency sank as he blithely flew by.

It's also where, just over two years ago, I saw Barack Obama launch his own hopes amid the ruins. As he'd later put it, the bigger the troubles, the greater the scope for change...

Beset by the economic crisis, Obama has used the opportunity to be busy across the board. He's promised wholesale reforms in health care, education, energy and conservation. Polls show that, so far, most Americans are happy enough with the direction: After all, they voted for it.

But others - a sizeable wedge - remain unconvinced. Obamaism, whatever it may be, is still taking shape, but it's leaving some Americans very uneasy.

These are the people who've been attending the so called Tea Parties - they claim their inspiration from the Boston revolutionaries.

All over the country conservatives have turned out in their thousands to protest against taxes and what they see as Obama's creeping socialism.

And it's not just economic policy which concerns them. From the reversal of Republican policies on abortion and stem cells to talking to America's adversaries, they feel Obama's taking their USA to Hell.

We met a group who'd run a tea party on the north shore of Lake Pontchatrain, across from New Orleans. They freely admitted yes, they were fearful.

Kevin Elliot says he's never before been politically active: "It looks like they're taking a crisis and using it to enable that progressive agenda, in a Blitzkrieg fashion.

"It seems that every day there's something coming out that we disagree with on a visceral level."

They speak of freedom under threat, of having to apologise to their children for what they're about to lose.

Two things strike you: the Tea Party people are almost exclusively white. And they all say America hasn't had a conservative president since Ronald Reagan.

In fact Obama agrees Reagan changed America and has cited him, admiringly, as a predecessor who seized his moment.

Of course Obama's solutions are very different to Reagan's. He has spoken of the "silent storms of poverty and joblessness, inequality and injustice" which Hurricane Katrina exposed in New Orleans but which "for far too long have ravaged" parts of the nation.

Liberals in the Democratic Party believe they now have a mandate to help the victims of those storms, to roll back a generation of conservatism.

The new president's great selling point is his intellect. He may run bigger government but it will be smarter government. That's the boast.

He's also trying to tap into the American sense of community, to get the people to do their bit and lend their neighbours a hand.

Fifty years ago they came from the north to help build the civil rights movement in the southern states. Today they're arriving to help rebuild the city of New Orleans after the flood.

Zack Rosenberg is a Washington lawyer who came to New Orleans to lend a hand three years ago and never left. His St Bernard project can rebuild an entire house for $15,000 - a sixth of the normal contractor's cost.

The labour is provided by volunteers and the material is funded by small government grants and private donations. It's non-partisan, not for profit and, he believes, it could be replicated across the country.

Perhaps Obama sees this as a model for rebuilding America. But those at the Tea Parties would be sceptical. Where's the free enterprise, the American spirit of the individual? Where's the profit in what sounds to them like naive liberal idealism?

The President's appeal to altruism and self-sacrifice is met with suspicion in the gun stores which have seen sales rocket since November. There's now a national shortage of ammunition.

The increased trade - up 100% in the Louisiana store we visited - has been driven by Obama's promise to reimpose controls on assault rifles and by that general, wide ranging anxiety identified by the people at the Tea Parties.

Obama's political savvy has now led him quietly to shelve his planned gun legislation.

Therein lies a lesson in Obamaism, both for those who fear it and for others who've invested in him such hope.

With battles ahead on so many fronts, President Obama is apparently choosing to fight only those he thinks he can win.

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President Obama is in a quandary. He's put himself in a box comparable to the one the CIA designed for Abu Zubaydah.

Obama's United States doesn't do torture, a principle he established and clearly stated on day two of his administration. Yet here he is, not yet at day one hundred, and torture is an issue which is causing him increasing damage.

Obama's troubles began earlier this month when he sanctioned the release of four memos in which Bush administration lawyers had given legal advice explaining that, for the purposes of interrogating suspected terrorists, exercises like waterboarding and headbanging (the head of the prisoner; against a wall) were pretty much OK.

It was also permissible to put Abu Zubaydah into a small box. And it was fine to put an insect in that box. It might be even better if Zubaydah, supposedly a former big noise at al-Qaeda who apparently fears insects, were wrongly to infer that the insect could sting, perhaps kill. But what would not be right or proper or legal or "within the statute's required predicate acts" would be to tell Zubaydah that the insect could do him harm (which, of course, it couldn't).

The best course, for a CIA man in a hurry, would seem to be to put Zubaydah in the box, drop the insect in there too, say nothing and wait for the screams.

President Obama may have no problems with insects but his room for manoeuvre is severely restricted. When the president ordered the release of the CIA memos it was in the belief that legal action by the American Civil Liberties Union would soon lead to their emergence anyway. He hoped swiftly to put the matter to rest and then "move the country on" as he put it, avoiding the distractions of partisan rancour.

What's happened is the Republican party has accused him of betraying national secrets and undermining the CIA while the liberal wing of his own party is pressing for a full blown truth commission. Their aim is to call to account the Bush administration lawyers who gave "enhanced interrogation techniques" legal cover.

Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee and one of the most respected figures on Capitol Hill, told me: "I don't agree with people who say let's turn the page if we haven't taken time to read the page. We can learn from our mistakes."

He mentions the Watergate hearings and how they left America "a better country". President Obama might feel a chill at that, recalling that America was also riven and demoralised after its Long National Nightmare of the early '70s.

The affair gives us our first glimpse of how the new, activist president runs things. We're told by the Washington Post that he chaired a night time meeting of officials both for and against letting the memos out before reaching his decision. He'd earlier sent a bipartisan deputation to the CIA to ask how the techniques had been applied. They were shocked at what they heard.

One of them, the former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, David Boren, described the CIA briefings as "one of the most deeply disturbing experiences I've had... I wanted to take a bath... I was ashamed."

The release of the memos, at this point, looks like a political blunder which the president could have easily avoided. Perhaps they would have emerged - just as photographs of "enhanced interrogations" will soon be released (another ACLU legal action - this could be Abu Ghraib with knobs on) - but Obama didn't need to issue the order himself.

George Bush was criticised for being a lazy president, he delegated and sat back, preferring to clear brush down in Crawford. Barack Obama is, yet again, Bush's opposite. He's super busy, ever on the move, doing. Will he stand condemned for doing too much?

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He is here, can't you feel him? Barack Obama is amongst us. After touching down at Stansted last night (Air Force One taking precedence over the budget airlines) he appeared before us, in corporeal form this morning, his presence a blessing on his good friend Gordon and a gift to all the world.

So how is it going? Well, quietly.

The Obama style on show at the Gordon-Barack news conference was at the dull end of the laid back spectrum. He opened with bromide about the lovely weather, looked momentarily stumped by Nick Robinson's opening question on who is to blame for the economic melt down, but then prevaricated so effectively that one had quite lost track by the time he reached the end of his answer... something along the lines of let's look forward, not back (what else).

But that is the thing with Obama, he takes his time. Before his election, indeed before he began campaigning, it was an integral part of his appeal. He would take a question, reflect, apparently giving it real thought, and then respond. The interlocutor would be flattered: this is a guy taking my concerns seriously. The candidate, having created the right impression, would glide away.

I have likened him to a class athlete, a top footballer, a Zinedine Zidane or a Kenny Dalglish, who, in the pell mell midst of a match would receive the ball and appear to stop the clock. All around them would be transfixed, spellbound as ZZ or Kenny would choose the perfect touch, or pass, or shot. The great players seem to make time. Obama, by any measure a great candidate, is the same.

The obverse of this is that Obama may also be accused of using this contemplative talent to avoid a subject, to stall. That is what has happened occasionally in his 70 days in the White House. What the president's supporters see as his cool intellect his detractors have interpreted as a classic politician's avoidance tactic. For example, he took a political age, over 24 hours, to condemn the bonus pay-outs to executives of AIG, a company bailed out with tax dollars.

When asked why he had been so slow to speak he said he liked to know what he was talking about before opening his mouth. It was a cool answer, one intended to draw a sharp distinction with his predecessor. But it didn't wash with the critics.

Obama may be habitually unflustered, but even his supporters are getting fretful at the absence of key appointees to his economic team. He has been taking his time, and so has Congress in approving his nominees.

As for his introductory performance at the Foreign Office, those unused to the Obama show were saying he seemed "tired". He is often that way, it is part of his style, relaxed.

Perhaps he overdid it today, to the extent that Gordon Brown looked like the leader with charisma, but then Obama was on foreign soil.

As Kenny Dalglish or Zinedine Zidane would tell you, in the first leg, away from home, the priority is to avoid errors, not to concede and to keep the crowd quiet.

On that basis President Obama can consider today's press conference a success.

Some of the crowd were nodding off.

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