Excessive expectations

Mathew Parris:

When half of mankind seems lifted by hope, nothing looks meaner than to disparage the dream. But what is this Obama mania? The world did not change for ever on Tuesday. No messiah has come among us. Miracles have not become possible. There is no new dawn. Calm down dear, it's only a US presidential election.

Here's my entry for Daniel Finkelstein's Comment Central competition for an eight-word expression of hope for the President-elect of the United States. Eight words precisely. “I hope he will let us down gently.”

But oh, what a long way down: down from the crest of expectation on which Barack Obama now surfs, on to the rough shingle of daily politics. Would that the wave might subside smoothly into the gentle swell of history. Would that it were not destined to break, dashing dreams and spawning new cynicism.

But I fear it will. Writing from Australia, and reading the local and the British press reaction to this election, I am appalled by the unanimity.

Yesterday I tried googling the name Obama with the phrase “President of the world”. There were 552,000 entries. In hopes of astringency I tried the leader column of The Daily Telegraph. “He is not so much an American citizen as a citizen of the world,” I read. “America, welcome back into the world,” gushed The Guardian, speaking for the world.

I turned to the Australian media. A spokesman for the Aboriginal community explains that the President-elect will have a special place in his sympathies for Aborigines. While Gordon Brown hopes the President-elect will have a special place in his heart for a British Labour Government, the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd (says the sobersided Australian Financial Review), believes special attention can be given to the US-Australian alliance “now Barack Obama has won”. Malcolm Turnbull, the Australian Leader of the Opposition, says Mr Obama's victory represented “a defining moment in history”.

“The election of Obama is when the old world ended and the new world began,” I read in the Australian Daily Telegraph. Kenyans look to Mr Obama for the President-elect's special attention. Gays note that he specially mentioned us in his victory speech.

So many alliances strengthened! So many special places in his heart! But why beat about the bush? Oprah Winfrey doesn't. “This is the most meaningful thing that has ever happened,” she gasps.

Useless, I know, to argue with infatuation, but I'll ask anyway: will we never learn?

Why, when we've been disappointed so often, do we fall for it every time with leaders? Here we have a handsome, dashing and intelligent man, a man with generous instincts and a silver tongue; but a man with no distinctive plan for government that he has seen fit to share with us; a daring opportunist; somebody we may one day judge as a sort of Tony Blair with brains. And here we go again, all over again, hook, line and sinker.

...

There is much more.

Actually, I think Tony Blair is probably smarter than Obama. At least Blair was not dead wrong about the surge in Iraq that saved the country and prevented a genocide Obama was willing to accept as the price of his cut and run policy. Besides all the other things that Obama will disappoint people on, it is clear that he is wrong on energy and taxes too.

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