Opinion polls show that Barack Obama remains a rock star on the international stage. In France, where just 13 per cent had a positive view of George Bush, 91 per cent express confidence in Mr Obama. In Jordan and Egypt, his approval ratings are quadruple that of his predecessor. And so it goes, from China to Latin America, and beyond.The “yes we can” effect allowed candidate Obama to romp to victory by invoking the power of collective determination, uniting Americans around a feel-good sense of the possibility of their better selves changing the world, rather than being locked into narrow policy choices. But it has not helped him to tackle the knotty problems facing America at home and abroad. The limits of personal charisma are clear in the curious fact that Mr Obama enjoys a far higher personal approval rating in US polls than do some of his key policies.
Even then, his approval rating has fallen by 9 per cent since he took office, down to 55 per cent in the latest poll, while the number of Americans who disapprove of the job he's doing has risen by 16 points to 41 per cent.Not that his supporters should panic: Barack Obama is simply another mortal politician, if an extremely good one, most of the time. Responding to the allegation of racial bias last week in the mistaken arrest of his friend, the African-American Harvard history professor Henry Louis Gates, Mr Obama revealed his human side in a flash of passionate emotion, saying the police had behaved “stupidly”.
It was an outburst as welcome as it was uncharacteristic (indeed he has already said he should have chosen his words more carefully), but Mr Obama's political self will look back on it as a lapse of discipline that created a distraction from his effort to push through his ambitious health-care reform plan. Senators and congressmen from both parties are resisting Mr Obama's efforts to tackle a central paradox in the American economy: that it devotes some 17 per cent of its GDP to health care but, according to the World Health Organisation, ranks 72nd in the world for overall levels of health. Nearly 15 per cent of Americans lack any health-care insurance coverage. But all the media wanted to talk about was the president's views on race and the Gates affair.
document.write('');
Plainly, Mr Obama's honeymoon period is over. Predictably, America has gone back to the politics-as-usual it so derides at election times. Entrenched interests in Washington remain as powerful as ever. Goldman Sachs and other investment banks have made a remarkable recovery, but hundreds of thousands of Americans lose their jobs every month – prompting many to wonder whose interests the new administration was prioritising. And liberals are increasingly uncomfortable with the extent to which Mr Obama has retreated on his promises to close down Guantanamo and try terror suspects in US courts.
Internationally, despite the rapturous applause and goodwill that greeted the new president wherever he travelled, little has changed from the Bush era in how foreign governments work with Washington. The French public may adore him, but their government fears he's soft on banking regulations and on Iran. And as beloved as he may be by the citizens of the Nato member countries, none has been any more responsive to requests for reinforcements in Afghanistan than they were to the same pleas from Mr Bush. And despite the focus and energy devoted to prodding Pakistan into realigning its security interests, its generals are openly at odds with the mini-surge strategy in Afghanistan, and Pakistan clearly has no intention of helping the US to fight the Afghan Taliban.
Despite the hoopla about hitting the reset button on relations with Russia, its leaders have made clear, as they did to Mr Bush, that if the US wants Moscow's co-operation on Iran or Afghanistan the price will be a retreat on the expansion of Nato and missile defences to Russia's doorstep. In the Middle East, A
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document.write(''); We all love Obama � but it's time he made some enemies
Tony Karon
Last Updated: July 25. 2009 11:39PM UAE / July 25. 2009 7:39PM GMT
Opinion polls show that Barack Obama remains a rock star on the international stage. In France, where just 13 per cent had a positive view of George Bush, 91 per cent express confidence in Mr Obama. In Jordan and Egypt, his approval ratings are quadruple that of his predecessor. And so it goes, from China to Latin America, and beyond.The “yes we can” effect allowed candidate Obama to romp to victory by invoking the power of collective determination, uniting Americans around a feel-good sense of the possibility of their better selves changing the world, rather than being locked into narrow policy choices. But it has not helped him to tackle the knotty problems facing America at home and abroad. The limits of personal charisma are clear in the curious fact that Mr Obama enjoys a far higher personal approval rating in US polls than do some of his key policies.
Even then, his approval rating has fallen by 9 per cent since he took office, down to 55 per cent in the latest poll, while the number of Americans who disapprove of the job he's doing has risen by 16 points to 41 per cent.Not that his supporters should panic: Barack Obama is simply another mortal politician, if an extremely good one, most of the time. Responding to the allegation of racial bias last week in the mistaken arrest of his friend, the African-American Harvard history professor Henry Louis Gates, Mr Obama revealed his human side in a flash of passionate emotion, saying the police had behaved “stupidly”.
It was an outburst as welcome as it was uncharacteristic (indeed he has already said he should have chosen his words more carefully), but Mr Obama's political self will look back on it as a lapse of discipline that created a distraction from his effort to push through his ambitious health-care reform plan. Senators and congressmen from both parties are resisting Mr Obama's efforts to tackle a central paradox in the American economy: that it devotes some 17 per cent of its GDP to health care but, according to the World Health Organisation, ranks 72nd in the world for overall levels of health. Nearly 15 per cent of Americans lack any health-care insurance coverage. But all the media wanted to talk about was the president's views on race and the Gates affair.
document.write('');
Plainly, Mr Obama's honeymoon period is over. Predictably, America has gone back to the politics-as-usual it so derides at election times. Entrenched interests in Washington remain as powerful as ever. Goldman Sachs and other investment banks have made a remarkable recovery, but hundreds of thousands of Americans lose their jobs every month – prompting many to wonder whose interests the new administration was prioritising. And liberals are increasingly uncomfortable with the extent to which Mr Obama has retreated on his promises to close down Guantanamo and try terror suspects in US courts.
Internationally, despite the rapturous applause and goodwill that greeted the new president wherever he travelled, little has changed from the Bush era in how foreign governments work with Washington. The French public may adore him, but their government fears he's soft on banking regulations and on Iran. And as beloved as he may be by the citizens of the Nato member countries, none has been any more responsive to requests for reinforcements in Afghanistan than they were to the same pleas from Mr Bush. And despite the focus and energy devoted to prodding Pakistan into realigning its security interests, its generals are openly at odds with the mini-surge strategy in Afghanistan, and Pakistan clearly has no intention of helping the US to fight the Afghan Taliban.
Despite the hoopla about hitting the reset button on relations with Russia, its leaders have made clear, as they did to Mr Bush, that if the US wants Moscow's co-operation on Iran or Afghanistan the price will be a retreat on the expansion of Nato and missile defences to Russia's doorstep. In the Middle East, Arab governments are resisting pressure to make new concessions to Israel, while Israel's leaders suspect that Mr Obama may be more politically vulnerable than he was six months ago and are picking a fight over Jerusalem.
Mr Obama has sought to present his solutions as win-win for all sides on every contentious issue, but in the real world he must make choices between competing interests that are often irreconcilable. The big pharmaceutical and health-insurance companies that profit most from the current dysfunctional health system, and have a powerful lobbying force in Congress, simply don't share the same interest as millions of uninsured Americans. Those who gain from selling medical care are also those most strenuously resisting a “public option” of a state-provided health insurance alternative. And to pay for his plan, Mr Obama will have to raise taxes, a prospect that has prompted many legislators of his own party to blanch.
No amount of charisma can bridge these differences. There's no win-win here: just hard choices that will inevitably turn many people against him.The same holds in foreign policy: Mr Obama has bumped into the reality that he can't improve relations with Russia at the same time as pushing for Georgia and Ukraine to join Nato. He has also had a crash course in the fact that no matter how many times he soothingly explains the logic of Pakistan making common cause with the US against the Afghan Taliban, Pakistan defines its own interests differently. And the idea that Benjamin Netanyahu's Israeli government is going to move forward on a credible two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians is plainly wishful thinking.
The “yes we can” president is fast bumping into the reality of “here's why you can't – unless you're willing to knock heads and make some enemies”.Tony Karon is a New York-based analyst who blogs at rootlesscosmopolitan.comtonykaron@gmail.com
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Opinion polls show that Barack Obama remains a rock star on the international stage. In France, where just 13 per cent had a positive view of George Bush, 91 per cent express confidence in Mr Obama. In Jordan and Egypt, his approval ratings are quadruple that of his predecessor. And so it goes, from China to Latin America, and beyond.The “yes we can” effect allowed candidate Obama to romp to victory by invoking the power of collective determination, uniting Americans around a feel-good sense of the possibility of their better selves changing the world, rather than being locked into narrow policy choices. But it has not helped him to tackle the knotty problems facing America at home and abroad. The limits of personal charisma are clear in the curious fact that Mr Obama enjoys a far higher personal approval rating in US polls than do some of his key policies.
Even then, his approval rating has fallen by 9 per cent since he took office, down to 55 per cent in the latest poll, while the number of Americans who disapprove of the job he's doing has risen by 16 points to 41 per cent.Not that his supporters should panic: Barack Obama is simply another mortal politician, if an extremely good one, most of the time. Responding to the allegation of racial bias last week in the mistaken arrest of his friend, the African-American Harvard history professor Henry Louis Gates, Mr Obama revealed his human side in a flash of passionate emotion, saying the police had behaved “stupidly”.
It was an outburst as welcome as it was uncharacteristic (indeed he has already said he should have chosen his words more carefully), but Mr Obama's political self will look back on it as a lapse of discipline that created a distraction from his effort to push through his ambitious health-care reform plan. Senators and congressmen from both parties are resisting Mr Obama's efforts to tackle a central paradox in the American economy: that it devotes some 17 per cent of its GDP to health care but, according to the World Health Organisation, ranks 72nd in the world for overall levels of health. Nearly 15 per cent of Americans lack any health-care insurance coverage. But all the media wanted to talk about was the president's views on race and the Gates affair.
Plainly, Mr Obama's honeymoon period is over. Predictably, America has gone back to the politics-as-usual it so derides at election times. Entrenched interests in Washington remain as powerful as ever. Goldman Sachs and other investment banks have made a remarkable recovery, but hundreds of thousands of Americans lose their jobs every month – prompting many to wonder whose interests the new administration was prioritising. And liberals are increasingly uncomfortable with the extent to which Mr Obama has retreated on his promises to close down Guantanamo and try terror suspects in US courts.
Internationally, despite the rapturous applause and goodwill that greeted the new president wherever he travelled, little has changed from the Bush era in how foreign governments work with Washington. The French public may adore him, but their government fears he's soft on banking regulations and on Iran. And as beloved as he may be by the citizens of the Nato member countries, none has been any more responsive to requests for reinforcements in Afghanistan than they were to the same pleas from Mr Bush. And despite the focus and energy devoted to prodding Pakistan into realigning its security interests, its generals are openly at odds with the mini-surge strategy in Afghanistan, and Pakistan clearly has no intention of helping the US to fight the Afghan Taliban.
Despite the hoopla about hitting the reset button on relations with Russia, its leaders have made clear, as they did to Mr Bush, that if the US wants Moscow's co-operation on Iran or Afghanistan the price will be a retreat on the expansion of Nato and missile defences to Russia's doorstep. In the Middle East, Arab governments are resisting pressure to make new concessions to Israel, while Israel's leaders suspect that Mr Obama may be more politically vulnerable than he was six months ago and are picking a fight over Jerusalem.
Mr Obama has sought to present his solutions as win-win for all sides on every contentious issue, but in the real world he must make choices between competing interests that are often irreconcilable. The big pharmaceutical and health-insurance companies that profit most from the current dysfunctional health system, and have a powerful lobbying force in Congress, simply don't share the same interest as millions of uninsured Americans. Those who gain from selling medical care are also those most strenuously resisting a “public option” of a state-provided health insurance alternative. And to pay for his plan, Mr Obama will have to raise taxes, a prospect that has prompted many legislators of his own party to blanch.
No amount of charisma can bridge these differences. There's no win-win here: just hard choices that will inevitably turn many people against him.The same holds in foreign policy: Mr Obama has bumped into the reality that he can't improve relations with Russia at the same time as pushing for Georgia and Ukraine to join Nato. He has also had a crash course in the fact that no matter how many times he soothingly explains the logic of Pakistan making common cause with the US against the Afghan Taliban, Pakistan defines its own interests differently. And the idea that Benjamin Netanyahu's Israeli government is going to move forward on a credible two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians is plainly wishful thinking.
The “yes we can” president is fast bumping into the reality of “here's why you can't – unless you're willing to knock heads and make some enemies”.Tony Karon is a New York-based analyst who blogs at rootlesscosmopolitan.comtonykaron@gmail.com
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Top stories Pay up or go to jail, banks tell debtors UAE economy grows 7% on oil, bank action Hayes completes epic trek du adds 156,000 mobile subscribers Jailed dive centre woman is free Ferrari: Massa stable after surgery Ferguson lashes out at City spending Your View Have you encountered any problems while job hunting?Have you had trouble parking your car near your home because car dealerships are occupying many of the available spaces?How has the economic downturn affected your spending?What will you be doing to keep fit this summer?Are you a young fan who has seen Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince? Send us your reviews. Most popular stories Most read Most e-mailed Discounts keep Atlantis Hotel's rooms full Bedbugs get a taste for blood this summer Job seekers are hit by illegal fees Ahmadinejad's VP resigns Searching for rain in Oman's Salalah Zayed and British museums collaborate India's school for the poor but gifted Have you encountered any problems while job hunting? Have you had trouble parking your car near your home because car dealerships are occupying many of the available spaces? Job hunters hit by illegal fees Make no little plans Blackberry maker questions Etisalat software upgrade Dubai to borrow second $10bn Marmooka City cut down to size Sorouh reschedules Reem project India's school for the poor but gifted Property executives in for long, hot summer The blueprint They'll insist that you enjoy their city – in Beirut you will Home buyers asked to pay Dh150,000 for parking space var countries=new ddtabcontent("countrytabs") countries.setpersist(true) countries.setselectedClassTarget("link") //"link" or "linkparent" countries.init() Products & Services Your View e-polls e-Paper RSS Feeds Home UAE World Business Sport About us Contact us Terms & Conditions FAQ Site map
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