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Rusty superpower in need of careful driver
Obama built his campaign on a positive vision, but in reality he will be the first US President to manage an empire in declineMatthew Parris
How often does a leader know, before he asks us for our votes, what office will ask of him? He mouths the promises of the moment but history may have a different task in mind. The role may be glorious, it may be tedious, but - count on this - it will be different.
Barack Obama declares and believes that he will change America, and that this makes possible incredible change in the world.
The accent throughout has been on the positive. Making things possible has marked the whole tenor of his campaign. Hope, optimism, ambition, confidence, reform amounting almost to renaissance - such has been his appeal. Yes, we can was a cocky, but not an empty slogan. A deep and swelling sense of the possible, focused on America's future but rooted in America's past, has dominated the struggle for the presidency. It would hardly be an exaggeration to call Mr Obama's promise transfigurative.
But maybe destiny has other plans. America's fate in the half-century ahead is not to be transfigured, but to be relegated. Steering your team through a relegation can be as important a test of leadership as handling a promotion, but it is a different test. Though he may not yet know it, the role for which the US President-elect has been chosen is the management of national decline. He will be the first US president in history to accept, and (if he has the gift) to teach, not the possibilities but the constraints of power.
Background
Don't expect Obama to get tough with Israel
2009 - it's going to get even worse
Great Expectations
So will Obama be able to hack it?
The fate of his predecessor George W.Bush was to test almost to destruction the theory of the limitlessness of American wealth and power - and of the potency of the American democratic ideal too. With one last heave he pitched his country into a violent and ruinous contest with what at times seemed the whole world, and the whole world's opinion. He failed, luminously.
But maybe somebody had to. Maybe we shouldn't be too hard on President Bush for donning a mantle hardly of his own making but a well-worn national idea created in the triumph and hegemony of victory in the Second World War. Maybe somebody had to wear those fraying purple robes one last time and see how much longer the world would carry on saluting; to pull the levers of the massive US economy one last time and see if there was any limit to the cash that the engine could generate; to throw the formidable US war machine into two simultaneous foreign wars and test - and find - a limit.
Eight years later it's haemorrhage, not regeneration, that the Obama presidency will have to nurse as it looks ahead. Europeans tend to consider presidential prospects in terms of US foreign policy - and there's much bleeding still to do in Afghanistan - but the incoming president's dominating concerns will surely be domestic and economic, and the two are spliced.
As a keen amateur car mechanic I have, since the age of 16, been puzzled by something about America. Here was a nation crazy about automobiles and held out to me as the last word in modernity, innovation, capitalist dynamism and go-ahead technology in all that it did. But its cars weren't any good. I say weren't - we're talking 1965 here - because some commentary about the current woes of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler has suggested that it is in recent years that the US automotive industry has slipped behind; and it's certainly only quite recently that they've started losing a lot of money.
But the product, though always flashy, has been technologically inferior since the end of Second World War. While European carmakers were pioneering front-wheel drive, independent suspension, small diesel engines and efficient automatic gearboxes, the Americans kept churning out big, thirsty, fast-rusting, primitively engineered behemoths. Partly this was because fuel was cheap, but the oversprung American limo, loose-handling and imprecise, was always a pig to drive, too. At root the problem was lack of competition.
And when I visited America, first as a boy then as a postgraduate student (in the 1970s), what struck me was not the modernity of modern America, but its inefficiency and old-fashionedness. The bureaucracy was Stone Age, the postal service unreliable, medical and dental treatment twice the cost of private treatment in England, and government officials treated you like serfs. People lived richly and worked hard - that was undeniable - but in a parallel universe clumsily and wastefully managed, and beset with internal friction. You couldn't even get a bank account that worked properly outside your state; and, for all the ostentatious vigour of retail competition, there was a curious lack of diversity in product choice. Though infinitely more successful and politically free, it was in some indefinable way more like the Soviet Union than either country would have wished to acknowledge.
What (I now think) I was encountering as early as 40 years ago was an ageing empire, losing its edge, almost imperceptibly losing its immense economic momentum, but still indecently wealthy and impervious to the emerging challenge of competition.
Rather suddenly, all this has caught up with it.
Mr Obama's vision of change - love, brotherhood, welfare, green politics and a new spirit of idealism - could now prove as irrelevant to the challenges a new president finds himself confronting as is David Cameron's early compassionate conservatism to his stern message today.
Both men's first drafts of politics got them to the launch pad; neither will fuel their rockets after lift off.
Instead, Mr Obama will face hard choices about how much of what America does (and what Americans do) can be afforded any longer; the next four years may be the worst possible time for hugely expensive healthcare reforms, a generous helping hand to the world's poor or a new military surge in Afghanistan.
In 2009 the US national debt will surge by $2trillion: some 70 per cent of gross domestic product. In these circumstances the questions must be: What can we cut? Where can we pull out? What can we stop doing that we're doing now? Mr Obama's fight - if fight he must - will be with the forces of economic protectionism, with anti-immigrant sentiment and with organised labour feather-bedding, pension protection and job protection.
But first, and underlying all these scraps, Mr Obama will have to find a way of being honest with Americans about their country's fall from predominance. Reading, as I often do, the furiously chauvinistic online reaction from US citizens to any suggestion that their country can be beaten at anything, I quail for him.
We British know something about the loss of empire. Successive 20th-century prime ministers struggled both to manage relative national decline and to make it explicable to the electorate. It is upon this road that 21st-century American presidents must now set foot. Mr Obama will be the first. Yes we can! was an easy sentiment to recommend. No we can't, will be a far, far harder thing to say.
Obama built his campaign on a positive vision, but in reality he will be the first US President to manage an empire in declineMatthew Parris
How often does a leader know, before he asks us for our votes, what office will ask of him? He mouths the promises of the moment but history may have a different task in mind. The role may be glorious, it may be tedious, but - count on this - it will be different.
Barack Obama declares and believes that he will change America, and that this makes possible incredible change in the world.
The accent throughout has been on the positive. Making things possible has marked the whole tenor of his campaign. Hope, optimism, ambition, confidence, reform amounting almost to renaissance - such has been his appeal. Yes, we can was a cocky, but not an empty slogan. A deep and swelling sense of the possible, focused on America's future but rooted in America's past, has dominated the struggle for the presidency. It would hardly be an exaggeration to call Mr Obama's promise transfigurative.
But maybe destiny has other plans. America's fate in the half-century ahead is not to be transfigured, but to be relegated. Steering your team through a relegation can be as important a test of leadership as handling a promotion, but it is a different test. Though he may not yet know it, the role for which the US President-elect has been chosen is the management of national decline. He will be the first US president in history to accept, and (if he has the gift) to teach, not the possibilities but the constraints of power.
Background
Don't expect Obama to get tough with Israel
2009 - it's going to get even worse
Great Expectations
So will Obama be able to hack it?
The fate of his predecessor George W.Bush was to test almost to destruction the theory of the limitlessness of American wealth and power - and of the potency of the American democratic ideal too. With one last heave he pitched his country into a violent and ruinous contest with what at times seemed the whole world, and the whole world's opinion. He failed, luminously.
But maybe somebody had to. Maybe we shouldn't be too hard on President Bush for donning a mantle hardly of his own making but a well-worn national idea created in the triumph and hegemony of victory in the Second World War. Maybe somebody had to wear those fraying purple robes one last time and see how much longer the world would carry on saluting; to pull the levers of the massive US economy one last time and see if there was any limit to the cash that the engine could generate; to throw the formidable US war machine into two simultaneous foreign wars and test - and find - a limit.
Eight years later it's haemorrhage, not regeneration, that the Obama presidency will have to nurse as it looks ahead. Europeans tend to consider presidential prospects in terms of US foreign policy - and there's much bleeding still to do in Afghanistan - but the incoming president's dominating concerns will surely be domestic and economic, and the two are spliced.
As a keen amateur car mechanic I have, since the age of 16, been puzzled by something about America. Here was a nation crazy about automobiles and held out to me as the last word in modernity, innovation, capitalist dynamism and go-ahead technology in all that it did. But its cars weren't any good. I say weren't - we're talking 1965 here - because some commentary about the current woes of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler has suggested that it is in recent years that the US automotive industry has slipped behind; and it's certainly only quite recently that they've started losing a lot of money.
But the product, though always flashy, has been technologically inferior since the end of Second World War. While European carmakers were pioneering front-wheel drive, independent suspension, small diesel engines and efficient automatic gearboxes, the Americans kept churning out big, thirsty, fast-rusting, primitively engineered behemoths. Partly this was because fuel was cheap, but the oversprung American limo, loose-handling and imprecise, was always a pig to drive, too. At root the problem was lack of competition.
And when I visited America, first as a boy then as a postgraduate student (in the 1970s), what struck me was not the modernity of modern America, but its inefficiency and old-fashionedness. The bureaucracy was Stone Age, the postal service unreliable, medical and dental treatment twice the cost of private treatment in England, and government officials treated you like serfs. People lived richly and worked hard - that was undeniable - but in a parallel universe clumsily and wastefully managed, and beset with internal friction. You couldn't even get a bank account that worked properly outside your state; and, for all the ostentatious vigour of retail competition, there was a curious lack of diversity in product choice. Though infinitely more successful and politically free, it was in some indefinable way more like the Soviet Union than either country would have wished to acknowledge.
What (I now think) I was encountering as early as 40 years ago was an ageing empire, losing its edge, almost imperceptibly losing its immense economic momentum, but still indecently wealthy and impervious to the emerging challenge of competition.
Rather suddenly, all this has caught up with it.
Mr Obama's vision of change - love, brotherhood, welfare, green politics and a new spirit of idealism - could now prove as irrelevant to the challenges a new president finds himself confronting as is David Cameron's early compassionate conservatism to his stern message today.
Both men's first drafts of politics got them to the launch pad; neither will fuel their rockets after lift off.
Instead, Mr Obama will face hard choices about how much of what America does (and what Americans do) can be afforded any longer; the next four years may be the worst possible time for hugely expensive healthcare reforms, a generous helping hand to the world's poor or a new military surge in Afghanistan.
In 2009 the US national debt will surge by $2trillion: some 70 per cent of gross domestic product. In these circumstances the questions must be: What can we cut? Where can we pull out? What can we stop doing that we're doing now? Mr Obama's fight - if fight he must - will be with the forces of economic protectionism, with anti-immigrant sentiment and with organised labour feather-bedding, pension protection and job protection.
But first, and underlying all these scraps, Mr Obama will have to find a way of being honest with Americans about their country's fall from predominance. Reading, as I often do, the furiously chauvinistic online reaction from US citizens to any suggestion that their country can be beaten at anything, I quail for him.
We British know something about the loss of empire. Successive 20th-century prime ministers struggled both to manage relative national decline and to make it explicable to the electorate. It is upon this road that 21st-century American presidents must now set foot. Mr Obama will be the first. Yes we can! was an easy sentiment to recommend. No we can't, will be a far, far harder thing to say.
