Editorial

Barack H. Obama’s entry into the White House certainly comes as a fresh whiff of breeze from corridors of power filled with gunpowder stink. That a black man could assume the mantle of world’s legally most powerful seat must be the most breathtaking political wonder of the new century. Notwithstanding his reticence on key economic issues afflicting the US and world economy, hopes are being pinned upon the man who has heralded the United State into the post-racial phase of history. He deserves credit for uttering not a word on the racial history and prejudices his million of co-colourmates have suffered in the most vibrant democracy in the world. It serves as a lesson on futility of flaunting past victimhood by individuals and groups, albeit few will deny that he was not a beneficiary of the fractious racial past of America.

Obama ran an intelligent and positive campaign in his run-up to the presidency. Bush’s nightmarish presidency was a more helpful companion to him than Senator McCain’s follies. Embattled, financially sapped electorate, and economically debilitated nation helped the blacks, the minorities, the youth, and a considerable number of Whites, to put their colour prejudices aside and plump for his promise of change.

But then it is useful to be reminded that occupants of the White House have their limitations. Obama will not be any exception in that he would be no less a prisoner in the hands of forces that shape and ideas that underlie the substructure of the American State. Euphoric opium would wear thin when power substructure would begin demanding Obama to fall in line. It was apparent from his campaign. He was none too shy to demonstrate the fawning obeisance towards the Israeli lobby. He did not allow Jimmy Carter to appear on the Democratic Party platform to speak for him, given the Israelis’ antipathy towards the former President for his unpardonable crime of authoring a highly critical book damning the Israeli policies.

Much against the rhetorical flourish of ‘we can change’, he may prove a disappointment in defanging the cabal of Zionist lobby whose identification of Israeli interest with America imparts centrality to the State Department policies. He would be under constant pressure to act against Muslim interests to prove that his middle name is incidental to his origin and not integral to his and Americans’ worldview. Looking at the impressive list of donors to his campaign (6,000 against McCain’s 2,600), it will be futile to expect that he would be acting against the pharmaceutical, nuclear arsenal, healthcare, electronics industries that rule the roost in dictating policies. Iran is not likely to be struck off the list of ‘rogue states’ and will be target of relentless bamboozling as ever. No radical shift is foreseen. The only difference he has shown till now is that he may lend ears to the lobby of ‘consensus builders’ who want opening the channels of negotiations.

Neither would Obama be able to disentangle himself from the stranglehold of US biggies who have just been bailed out with massive sops from the public exchequer. He was also among those who voted for the bailout as was he on the question of Bush’s Patriot Act which was unprecedented in striking at the civil liberties in the US.

Prevalent mood of self-congratulations in the United State on ‘undoing the racism’ by electing a black man for White House, may begin to hurt the blacks. Obama victory may well be used to suppress the push for racial equality. Americans would need summoning enough sanity to resist the temptation to use Obama presidency as a ‘White guilt repellent’ in the words of the commentator Steve Sailer. The advocates of post-racial America would need to look why Black areas have substandard schools, why unemployment soars among them and why the American jails have dispproportionately high number of blacks as inmates. A Black in White House does not really substitute fundamental changes in attitude.

Obama acknowledgedly ran a race-neutral campaign and may not be amenable to bold brush to erase past ignominies as he himself has said that racial oppression was confined to the past. He also knows his limitation that any rush to heal the divide would erode his political supports among the Wasps who would dub him ‘angry blackman in the White House’.