The Heat Is On President Obama
Yesterday the American government released the unemployment numbers for October. American Unemployment officially reached 10.2%. This figure is thought to be as high as 17% if you include the number of people who have stopped looking for work and those who are off the unemployment rolls (you can collect unemployment money for a given period of time afterwhich the government does not consider you as unemployed). Many Asian economies including that of India and China have recovered from the economic crisis brought up on by the American housing industry collapse in the third quarter of 2008. For most Americans the current economic conditions are bleak and are very unlikely to change anytime soon. The public’s anger is now squarely targeted at President Obama and the Democratic administration. In the state and local elections that were held a couple of days ago the Republicans captured most of the key seats including that of the governor of New Jersey and Virginia. This is a big blow to the Obama administration.
There are some parallels between what is going on now and what happened to President Bush during in his presidency. President Bush campaigned as a compassionate conservative in 2000. He wanted American troops back from their bases overseas. He wanted America to limit its exposure to China, reduce the size of the US government and most importantly he wanted religion (Christianity) to have more of an influence on the state than what was at that time. Unfortunately President Bush could not meet his objectives. Six months into his first presidency America was attacked by Islamic fundamentalists. Everybody knows what happened next. President Bush became the war president. To his credit he did keep America safe after 9/11. But the size of the US government was bigger than ever, the country was at war in both Afghanistan and Iraq and most importantly the budget which was “balanced” by President Clinton in 2000 was facing major deficits by the end of his term in 2008.
Candidate Obama ran as a “change” candidate. He talked a lot about changing the system and the culture in Washington. He offered something for everyone. There was optimism in the air. I personally thought that candidate Obama was the closest imitation of an Indian politician. He has tremendous communication skills and could speak for long periods of time and say very inspiring things. But I always wondered (because of my experiences with Indian politicians) whether candidate Obama would be able to meet any of these things he is promising to millions of people. Just like Bush (whose presidency was turned upside down by events of 9/11 six months into his presidency) candidate Obama got a shock a month before the elections when the US economy started crumbling because of the financial crisis caused by the housing market.
One of the things that concern me is that the economy (most importantly the job market) is yet to recover although we are almost 14 months into the economic crisis. The President unfortunately is pressing on with this political agenda that he talked about during the elections. This includes reforming the health care system in this country. In many of his speeches he has even completely stopped talking about the economy or use the word recession (this is very similar to the situation when then President Bush stopped using Osama Bin Laden’s name for a period almost one year. He did not want to remind the American public of his single biggest failure which was the inability to capture or kill Bin Laden). Now Obama seems to be following the same example as far as the economy is concerned.
Whatever President Obama achieves he will not be able to get reelected if the economy continues to perform the way it has so far. If the economy does not improve then he will be unable anyway to make any changes to social security, Medicare or heath care. The momentum that he got by winning the election has almost vaporized. It will become extremely difficult for him to get any support to undertake major reform with an economy that is going down the drain (experts can point to a 3.5% growth rate in the GDP in the third quarter but data like this has not made any difference to the unemployed). It is time for President Obama to take a leaf out of President Bush’s presidency and focus on the key issue at hand. For Bush it was terrorism. For Obama it is the economy.
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- Will India be Thrilled if GOP Wins the Midterms?
Category: News & Government