Last July after Senator Obama won the Democratic Party primaries, I convened an eSymposium, The Meaning and Implications of the Obama Phenomenon, in which several contributors wrote on the Obama phenomenon. They addressed many issues including, as I wrote in the Introduction to the eSymposium,
Obama as the signified and signifier of black citizenship and globality, the symbolic and substantive implications of his candidacy, the power of hope and the limits of structural change his presidency would represent, the quintessential Americanness of this most gifted of politicians and the anxious Pan-African expectations pinned on him. While celebrating the historic achievement and possibilities that Obama's candidacy imply, all the contributors caution against investing a possible Obama presidency with the illusions of transformational power.
I fully share their caution. For all the excitement generated by his candidacy, Obama is not a radical figure by any stretch of the political imagination. He is beholden more to capital than labor, to the elites than the poor, to neo-liberalism than social democracy, to American hegemony than global disarmament, to American supremacy than Pan-African solidarity. In fact, as far as the Pan-African world is concerned, it is remarkable how little he has spoken about Africa, the Caribbean and other countries with large African diaspora populations. His first post-primary victory meeting was to shamefully supplicate before the Jewish lobby.
Obama's Africa, as outlined in his book The Audacity of Hope, and on his campaign website, is the conventional pathological Africa of disease, poverty, corruption, dictatorships, and war that plunges him "into cynicism and despair," until he is reminded that charity, western philanthropy, not trade and partnership, can go a long way to help this benighted continent of his father and numerous Kenyan relatives.
If Senator Obama is to develop a more progressive policy towards Africa and the African diaspora at large including those in his own country who have helped catapult him to the dizzying heights of American politics that no African American has ever reached, we have to hold him accountable by keeping vigilant and offering critical support and principled criticism.
A year after his election as president, and ten months after he took office, the euphoria that greeted his audacious ascendancy to power is almost forgotten, the once dispirited and frightened right is energized and emboldened, the invigorated left disappointed and frustrated, and the ecstatic youths who followed his every word and gesture and promise of hope and new beginnings feel disempowered. In the black online media, those who dismissed the Obama presidency in advance feel vindicated (Black Agenda Report), while those who welcomed it cautiously feel increasingly disillusioned (Black Commentator).
It is easy to see why the honeymoon was bound to be so shortlived: the enchanting and enigmatic new president inherited a broken country at war and in deep recession. But the political wounds clawing at the Obama Administration are increasingly self-inflicted arising out of the timidity of centrist politics, the Democrats' peculiar discomfort with power, the president's strange obsession with bipartisanship, and his deliberative indecisiveness.
Above all, it points to the structural deformities, the systemic limits of an exhausted, imperial nation unable to move forward, incapable of renewing itself, the herculean hurdles of restoring a more productive politics, a more equitable social compact at home and abroad, a new order that promotes and protects truly inclusive domestic and global citizenship. In this sense, the promises and failures of the Obama Presidency are part of a much larger story, the epic decisions facing 21st century America, how to become a normal country free from the intertwined daunting fractures at home and doomed fantasies of empire abroad, how to manage internal differences and international decline, how to tie national well-being in webs of mutuality to global well-being.
In the article below, leading commentators from around the world assess whether Obama has met the dizzying hopes, the electrifying dreams the world once invested in him and his Administration.PTZeleza, Editror, The Zeleza Post
The Guardian: A Year On, Has Barack Obama Met the Hopes of the World?
Last November, in Chicago's Grant Park, world politics was transformed by the arrival of America's first black president. But has he made good on his groundbreaking promises?...
