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  The World President: Great Expectations for Project Obama

The World President Great Expectations for Project Obama

By SPIEGEL Staff

Part 6: The Limits of the 'American Way of Life'

The "American Way of Life," that special blend of deliberate recklessness, wanton waste and a touch of megalomania, is reaching its limits. In recent years, the superpower has gone from one careless mistake to the next. The government was too arrogant, the banking industry was too greedy and the economy, after allowing itself to indulge in obscene scandals, was no longer innovative enough to be able to maintain the country's status as an economic superpower. This has left the United States with massive problems of historic proportions.

In no other country in the Western world is so much costly energy wasted. The United States is home to only five percent of the world's population, but it consumes a quarter of its oil production. The United States sends $90 billion to the Middle East in the space of only one year.

In recent years, the engines of US economic growth have not been high levels of exports and exceptional inventions, but primarily the massive debt consumers have racked up. The savings rate in Germany is 11 percent. In the United States it is barely one percent. Everyone, from the government to ordinary credit card customers, lives on credit.

The Bush administration has aggravated all of these problems instead of alleviating them. It has allowed industry to continue to believe that cheap oil would be available forever. It urged the population to keep on borrowing and consuming, so that now -- at the beginning of a deep recession -- it has nothing left to spend. A system has come crashing down. The crisis of capitalism brings to a full circle the loss of moral and political authority after the Iraq war.

The mood in the ancestral homeland of optimism is appropriately pessimistic. It is the insidious simultaneity of the crisis of confidence, the real estate disaster, the drama in the financial markets and the most recent oil price shock that has put American citizens in such a foul mood. In an article titled " Unhappy America," the Economist writes: "Nations, like people, occasionally get the blues."

President-elect Obama cannot wait until his inauguration on Jan. 20. Instead, he must lay out his plans for dealing with the crisis. And he must also announce whom he intends to entrust with the most important post in his cabinet, that of treasury secretary. Rahm Emanuel, his friend and confidant from Chicago, who, in his position as White House chief of staff, will serve as a general manager of sorts, has already said that the president will have no other choice, and that "we must be the government of reform."

For the assertive Emanuel, there are four key programs for the Obama administration: Tightening regulation of the financial markets, tax relief for the middle class, healthcare reform and the nation's energy needs. Market regulation, says Emanuel, will be on the agenda at the upcoming summit in Washington, and it will likely be approved soon. But tax reform, he says, will take longer -- partly because Bush's tax cuts remain in effect until 2010. When it comes to energy policy, says Emanuel, many things are possible today, such as promoting alternative energy projects -- and the same applies to healthcare policy, where the first step will be to provide immediate coverage for the uninsured children of the unemployed.

But where does Obama intend to get the money he will need for these programs? This year's budget deficit will be at least $800 billion. The new president will have to tighten the nation's belt. Indeed, he has already characterized the budget as the biggest of all problems. "We need clear priorities," says Obama.

The examination of accounts that every new administration undertakes won't happen until January. Obama's transition team is currently considering another tax rebate. In America, tax rebates traditionally come in the form of checks sent directly to households, usually the occasion for a small celebration. There are indications that Bush's 2008 economic stimulus package, worth $170 billion (€133 billion), will be followed by an even bigger check from the Obama administration.

As popular as these tax rebates are, though, they wreak havoc on the government's cash position, and their economic impact is debatable. In the new global economy, such stimulus programs are no longer as effective in jump-starting national economies as they used to be. In fact, much of the additional cash now ends up in the hands of importers in Asia.

Obama has also announced a number of social policy plans. The initially hesitant support for his candidacy among white working-class voters in swing states prompted him to make generous campaign promises. The strategy paid off in votes, but now the time is coming when he will be expected to make good on those pledges. One of his key campaign promises was "affordable health insurance for all." Forty-seven million Americans are currently uninsured -- nothing less than a scandal for such a wealthy country.

Another of Obama's campaign promises, sometimes voiced several times a day, was a $150 billion (€117 billion) infrastructure program. Its goal is to repair the country's ailing infrastructure, create new jobs and advance protection of the environment. Obama plans to implement this program, even if its scope has to be reduced and the planned 10-year time frame prolonged.

Nevertheless, Obama can't possibly please everyone, despite the long list of pledges he made during the lengthy campaign. He will have to decide whom to disappoint first.

The Obama team knows only too well that the worst enemy of an Obama presidency will be within the Democratic Party ranks. In two other similarly overwhelming victories for Democrats -- in 1964 and 1992 -- the party pushed through its wish list. But the tax increases and new social programs for the poor that they implemented horrified swing voters. It took only two years for the Democrats to lose their majority in Congress, as well as the nation's good will.

Obama, on the other hand, has promised to overcome the culture wars between the parties and divisions within the electorate. In his acceptance speech on the night of the election, he said: "We rise or fall as one nation, as one people." And in the end, the 44th president will rise or fall with the success of the reforms he has promised his country, which both wants and needs reforms.

"This president is going into office with more expectations than any president I have ever seen," says Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives and Obama's most important contact for all the laws he hopes to enact in order to bring change to the country. Because of the enormity of the challenge, Obama will likely attempt to advance his reforms one step at a time, not all at once. He will "govern the country from the center," says Democratic Party strategist Tad Devine.

This would be the most reasonable approach, too, because America is still primarily a conservative nation. In surveys, Americans are much more likely to call themselves conservative than liberal. Obama cannot change this, but he needs advocates who are willing to make compromises, and he will seek some of them from among the so-called Obamacons -- Republicans who supported him during the election -- including such high-profile politicians as Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel and former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

On Jan. 20, the four Obamas will move into the White House in Washington, accompanied by parties and balls and perhaps the kind of pageantry that would suit the historical significance of the day. The new president will change Washington, and Washington will change him.

The American capital likes to adore its new president and allow itself to be shaped by his character. Bill Clinton's Washington was a jazz mecca, while Bush's Washington is a sleepy place. The current president usually retires to his bedroom by 9 p.m. He never went to parties, and the New York Times described a wild night for Bush as a dinner at the home of his former strategist Karl Rove in the city's Kent neighborhood.

The Obamas, on the other hand, are seen as cool, modern and fun-loving, and it will matter very little whether Barack and Michelle prefer to spend their evenings helping the girls with their homework or playing cards -- life, or so Washingtonians hope, will return to Washington with the Obamas and their generation. The fashion magazines have already declared Michelle a style icon, the first since former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.

Barack Obama will soon be president, and no matter how his presidency ends, Nov. 4, 2008 will have changed the country. He said as much in his speech to fellow Americans and the entire world on that Tuesday evening in Chicago. In Grant Park, near Lake Michigan, his listeners already felt that nothing was the way it once was. "The city changed in that one night," says Joan Harrell, "people had smiles on their faces."

Joan Harrell is 51, black, sports a haircut as short as Obama's, and lives in his Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, 10 kilometers (six miles) from the city's downtown. It is a world Obama invokes in his speeches, home to welfare recipients, college students and millionaires, blacks and whites. There are more interracial couples in Hyde Park than in most other neighborhoods in the country.

Joan Harrell lives in a third-floor rented apartment on the corner of Hyde Park Boulevard and South Drexel Boulevard, two blocks from the Obama's house. She can see the street in front of his house from her window, can see the concrete barriers and, of course, the police officers who have been posted at the house around the clock for the past two years.

The level of activity has only increased there since Tuesday evening. The eight to 10 police officers Harrell used to count have turned into 16, more people are being asked for identification on the streets, and the bus stop in front of her building has suddenly disappeared.

The day was already crazy enough. Things were looking good for Obama. He was ahead in the polls, and on that Tuesday, Democrats believed in victory for the first time. Harrell went to the Walgreens drug store around the corner, where Obama also shops, and bought Obama T-shirts and Obama sweatshirts for her relatives in Georgia.

When she returned to her apartment, Harrell called her mother in Georgia. The women prayed together, and Harrell watched CNN. When the network declared Obama the winner, she began to cry, and her mother in Georgia cried along with her. Harrell spent the entire evening on the phone with friends and relatives, crying and praying, and when she finally went to bed, at 1 a.m., she still couldn't believe that it had really happened.

But then she heard a helicopter overhead and, looking out of her window, saw the flashing blue lights of police cars. "Obama is coming home," she thought, and then she says: "When I saw the flashing light, I knew that it was really true."

BY KLAUS BRINKBÄUMER, MARC HUJER, CORDULA MEYER, GERHARD SPÖRL AND GABOR STEINGART

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.

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