MOSCOW, August 5 (Itar-Tass) — By his 50th jubilee US President Barack Obama has lost his administrative power and love of Americans, The Moscow News writes in a commentary dedicated to the anniversary of Obama. There are more than enough problems for Obama and America. The slogan of his first presidential campaign – “Yes we can!” – today sound at least dubiously.
Two days before his 50th birthday Barack Obama narrowly prevented a technical default of the United States. The Republicans made the president at the negotiations on the budget to give up his major initiatives, including health insurance reform. Moreover, the Republicans did not yield to Obama’s persuasions to raise taxes for large corporations. Many have called the incident a political fiasco of the president.
It is possible to judge about the collapse of old hopes in the American society from the first video of Obama’s new electoral campaign. It does not tell the Americans about the past successes of the policy, but how important it is to continue the started changes now that the country is at a crossroads, having not overcome the crisis yet. Trust is the ideological basis of Obama’s new campaign. The problem is that the president had lost his. Now his popularity is 42 percent, which is 18 percent less than the rating of George W. Bush during the same period of his presidency.
“The main problem was that in the period between 2008, when Obama was campaigning, to 2009, when the crisis hit the United States, the country has changed dramatically. And when the new president took office, the American did not need his main campaign promises. The population was waiting for one thing – new jobs,” said Stephen Hess, an expert at the Brookings Institution, former White House adviser who has worked with Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
According to Hess, Obama is the first intellectual president since the times of Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921). He spoke intelligently, beautifully and a lot. However, largely because of this his credibility was damaged.
The most eloquent domestic political miscalculation of Obama was a hasty promise to close by 2010 the Guantanamo Bay military base prison where during tenure of George W. Bush US intelligence agencies tortured prisoners accused of terrorism.
The closure of the prison on Obama’s order was to symbolically end the era of the “war on terror” – an era that combined the greatest tragedy of September 11 and questionable military conflicts, the ideologue of which was the previous president of the United States. But in 2010, White House officials said that the prison would not be closed in the near future.
Obama has not only failed to keep campaign promises. Even having scattered Osama bin Laden’s ashes over the ocean, he could not deal with the legacy of George W. Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama’s peacemaking in the Middle East have also not yielded fruit so far – neither for him nor the Israelis nor the Palestinians, although he tried to break the traditional line for the US unconditional support for Israel.
The only unquestionable breakthrough in Obama’s foreign policy is the New START treaty, which the US president signed with RF President Medvedev in Prague on April 8, 2010. However, by 2011 the dynamics of the “reset” has slowed down. The plans to develop a missile defence system in Europe continue to remain a strong irritant to Moscow, the newspaper concludes.