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    How Obama Lost America
    How Obama Lost America
    How Obama Lost America
    Ebook133 pages2 hours

    How Obama Lost America

    By Donald Morrison

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    About this ebook

    When Barack Obama became America's 44th -- and first black -- President, the world rejoiced. Obama remains the most popular government leader anywhere -- except in his own country. There, his approval ratings have plummeted, his opponents have thwarted him at nearly every turn, and his own supporters are restive. Though he won re-election, his second term is becoming an uphill slog.
    What did he do wrong? How did he squander all that popularity and promise? In a witty and highly personal account, veteran journalist Donald Morrison describes America's growing perplexity with Obama. He examines the President's background, personality and governing style and finds hidden flaws. He also identifies recent changes in American society and politics that have undermined the President's effectiveness. Obama fans and foes alike will find much to learn from this book -- and much to enjoy.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDonald Morrison
    Release dateJul 10, 2012
    ISBN9781476379449
    How Obama Lost America
    Author

    Donald Morrison

    Donald Morrison is a writer, editor and lecturer based in Paris and Miami. He is a former editor of TIME Magazine's European and Asian editions. He has taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing and the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po) in Paris. He has written for the Financial Times, the New York Times, Le Monde and other journals. For more information, go to www.donaldmorrison.net

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      Book preview

      How Obama Lost America - Donald Morrison

      What others are saying about

      How Obama Lost America

      Full of anecdotes, of visions of an America divided, this book reminds us that a president (in the U.S. and elsewhere) needs more than dreams.

      – Les Echos

      It was daring, but Donald Morrison did it. Predicting months in advance the outcome of the U.S presidential election without even knowing who the Republican nominee would be. Better yet, he did it by examining the character of America's first black president. Book of the week.

      – Le Journal du Dimanche

      Donald Morrison is the right man to help us understand his country, which sometimes appears so indecipherable to us. At the dawn of this election year, it is imperative to read How Obama Lost America. Despite this slightly peremptory and perhaps premature title, the author has much sympathy for the President, whom he chides for tactical mistakes and a failure to communicate. But Morrison also paints a compelling portrait of another America, the one of birthers and Tea Partiers. He uses polling data to show how these two countries do not really understand each other – as if the Civil War had never ended. He informs us, for instance, that a fifth of Americans know someone who has been kidnapped by aliens. For these folks, and many others, describing Obama as an intellectual, a complicated and introspective statesman, is a condemnation. The worst thing is that Obama often gives them reason to think that way.

      – Politis Magazine

      How Obama Lost America

      Donald Morrison

      Copyright 2012 by Donald Morrison

      Smashwords Edition

      Smashwords License Statement

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      For Luke and Priya, who deserve to grow up in a country that places no limits on their dreams.

      Contents

      Introduction

      Chapter 1: Rise and Fall

      Chapter 2: The Obama Mystique

      Chapter 3: Great Expectations

      Chapter 4: Governing

      Chapter 5: Innocent Abroad

      Chapter 6: The Shellacking

      Chapter 7: What Went Wrong?

      Chapter 8: America Unhinged

      Chapter 9: Tea Time

      Chapter 10: Recovery

      Chapter 11: The Obama Legacy

      Acknowledgements

      About the Author

      Introduction

      If you want to understand America, go to Springfield. The country has nearly three-dozen towns of that name, not including the fictional home of television’s Homer Simpson. But to me, there is only one Springfield: the capital of the great state of Illinois, in the heart of America. I was born and raised not far from that flat and humid burg (pop. 120,000), as were my parents and various other ancestors. Abraham Lincoln, perhaps America’s greatest President, began his political career there. A young, little-known lawyer, he represented Springfield in the Illinois legislature and then the U.S. Congress before becoming America’s 16th president. After his assassination five years later, in 1865, he was buried in Springfield.

      Barack Obama too, began his political career in Springfield. In 1997, the young, little-known lawyer took up his duties there as a newly elected Illinois state legislator. Ten years later, Obama launched his successful campaign for the U.S. presidency from the steps of Springfield’s Old State Capitol building, as had Lincoln a century and a half earlier. To grow up in Illinois is to know hope and disappointment in equal measure. Our sports teams were perennial losers. Our workforce was forever shrinking. Our economy was in decline. Our politicians – with the notable exception of Lincoln, 1950s Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson and my father, a one-time liquor commissioner of Madison County – are famous for their tendency to be sent to prison for corruption.

      And so, along with many sons and daughters of Illinois, I was deeply moved in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected as America’s 44th President. Finally, after years of flawed and disappointing characters, America had chosen a leader of vision, charisma and intelligence. More than that, he was black – proof the nation had finally completed the work of Abraham Lincoln and exorcised a disgraceful history of slavery and racial bigotry. After decades of having our hearts broken – by murder (John F. Kennedy), malfeasance (Richard Nixon) and misguided adventurism (George W. Bush) – Americans finally had a President for whom we did not have to apologize.

      So imagine my chagrin when the Obama who had inspired such hope as a presidential candidate turned out to be, as we shall see, less than expected. At first, I took this apparent failure personally. I had abandoned my Illinois roots to live outside the U.S., so I was not around to help Obama when he needed me. My family members (most still live in and near Springfield) were exposed to a rain of calumnies and half-truths spread by his enemies, and I was not there to set things straight. For his part, Obama has made mistakes so fundamental that even I could probably have foreseen them, and perhaps warned against them. At the same time, however, I had chosen a calling, journalism, whose ethics compelled me to maintain a discreet detachment from partisan politics. And the more detached I tried to be, the more I began to wonder whether my initial impressions of Obama were in fact correct. Perhaps, it occurred to me, America’s first black President is not such a hero after all. Maybe he is just another clumsy, calculating, compromising politician. Perhaps it was inevitable that he would lose the trust of his fellow Americans. Had I been wrong about Obama, and how could I tell?

      By writing this book. It was initially intended to explain to my foreign friends why Americans no longer loved Obama as much the rest of the world did. But the more I pondered that question, the more I realized that I was really pursuing this project for myself. Like many people, I found Obama to be one of the most enigmatic figures in recent history. To the wider world, he is the most exciting U.S. President in half a century. To Americans, he is a polarizing figure – inspiring to some, infuriating to others. Perhaps by examining him more thoroughly, I could figure out why he was at the same time so admired and so despised, so inspiring and so disappointing. And maybe I would discover what had happened to the America I used to know.

      So I talked to Americans and non-Americans about Obama, examined his writings and the enormous outpouring of words he has inspired, delved into his origins and the influences that shaped his view of the world. I also looked at the forces that were remaking his country into a place the rest of the world no longer recognized.

      I concluded that Obama is, in a sense, a metaphor for America and, of course, Illinois – a vehicle of hope and disappointment in equal measure. Though he and I each spent time in the same places, share a few friends and former colleagues and, yes, exchange Christmas cards, I cannot pretend to know him, much less understand him. As we shall see, few people do. Yet by studying his rise to power, his accomplishments and mistakes, his links to America’s past and his vision for its future, we can learn much about his country and our world in the 21st century. For Obama is the first truly modern leader of this globalized, racially diverse, media-molded and alarmingly turbulent era. His story is ours.

      Chapter 1: Rise and Fall

      Angela Merkel was not pleased. The 2008 American presidential election was only four months away, and the German Chancellor had just received word that one of the two major candidates, the Democratic Party’s Barack Obama, wanted to hold a rally in Berlin. Worse, he wanted to speak in front of the Brandenburg Gate, a site of particular historical significance for Germans. For more than 300 years, the gate has stood as a symbolic point of entry to central Berlin. The ornate sculpture of a four-horse chariot crowning the structure was hauled off to Paris by French soldiers in 1809 after the Napoleonic wars. Prussian troops brought it back in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War. Nazi partisans marched through the gate upon taking power in 1933, and East Berliners streamed through in 1989 for their first glimpse of the West after the fall of the Berlin wall.

      Why did Obama want to visit Berlin? After all, the city is more than 3,000 miles from the U.S. and has only a few thousand resident Americans. Didn’t Obama – a first-term U.S. Senator who spoke no German and was locked in a fierce presidential election campaign – have more pressing duties back home? Merkel knew the answers, which no doubt deepened her irritation. Obama, then only 46 years old, was clearly hoping to benefit from comparisons to another young American: John F. Kennedy, whose 1963 speech in Berlin has become one of the century’s most memorable rhetorical feats. Kennedy, also 46 at the time, came to what was then West Berlin as the youngest man ever elected U.S. President. He spoke only a few minutes before a crowd of half a million people, but his closing words echo through the ages: "All free men, wherever they live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, Ich bin ein Berliner." When Kennedy delivered those last four words, in heavily accented German, the crowd went wild. Germans got the message that the U.S. would stand behind them in the face of Soviet expansionism, and Kennedy gained a permanent place in their hearts.

      Contrary to popular myth, Kennedy did not speak at the Brandenburg Gate, but about two miles away, in front of West Berlin’s city hall. It was another American President, Ronald Reagan, who put the Brandenburg Gate

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