“SIR, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
Other than William Shakespeare, no English writer is more cited than Dr Johnson, or Samuel Johnson, who left no books but for the first dictionary of our language on which he spent a decade. I cite the above to make a crude point about the current Potus — president of the United States.
Barack Obama had already been pictured in the New York Times for being the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. Over and over he surprised, yet, the wonder in 2009 was that he was Potus at all. Underlying this was and is a huge undercurrent of racism, so large we are just now grasping its significance. Above that lay an even more dangerous current of thought that blacks made great athletes, but cognitive measurements showed East Asians to be the best, Africans the lowest scorers. We all came from Africa, so presumably, such measurements have to be used cautiously.
An amusing Facebook posting summarises neatly that under Obama, the stock market has almost tripled, the number of uninsured halved, the banking system was saved, the United States withdrew from two wars but oh, Fox News says he’s a failed president. America re-elected him, he’s given the greatest speeches since Abraham Lincoln’s a century-and-a-half ago, but still…
What is so little realised is how non-accidental this all is. Dr Johnson also said “self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings” and Obama had that — and planned great undertakings. From Day One, he began signing executive orders to reverse the indolence and wrong-headedness of the previous decade, like permitting stem cell research. No sooner was he back in Washington from his sad but epochal trip to Charleston last week — his eulogy being compared with Lincoln’s great second inaugural — that he signed another order, untouchable by Congress, doubling to over 50 million workers eligible for overtime.
I see Obama’s last quarter as almost a juggernaut, an unstoppable vast vehicle gathering speed as it approaches its destination. Timing favours the prepared.
In September, the man he shares the “most important in the world” title with, Sr Bergoglio, Il Papa Francisco, visits Washington.
The mean little men running Congress who have done all to enrich the wealthy and hit the poor happen to be Catholics, and must belie the day they invited the Pope. For I doubt Pope Francis will dwell on climate change; he’s too shrewd to use a joint session of Congress for that message.
He will hit out at the growing wealth gap — nowhere more so than in the United States of America — and soften up Congress for major Obama legislation to address the abysmal gap between rich and poor. The papal visit will be like nothing America has seen in a long time, but Potus will be the prime beneficiary, as he continues to sign executive orders that help spread the vast American wealth to those needing it most.
And then there will be travel. Do you know what a presidential visit entails? Up to 3,000 Secret Service detail will be, in all-too-American style, shoving aside their local counterparts to enhance the security of the most vulnerable man on earth. Two globe masters will deliver two “Beasts” that look like limousines but are tanks on wheels, with 18cm steel doors and 15cm glass, each weighing 10,000kg. Thirty-five other vehicles will carry essentials — artillery, blood and “the” suitcase with the nuclear codes (don’t worry, one other official — presumably the secretary of defence — has to enter the code, too, before any bombs can go off, and Obama is not exactly the bomb-friendly type).
A Boeing 747 will carry journalists, so that when Potus makes his sentimental visit to his father’s native Kenya, and to the Luo village, where his grandmother (unrelated by blood) and numerous half-siblings and cousins have already renamed almost everything after their illustrious son, will be all but overwhelmed.
What about the big one — the new Cold War between East and West? Obama has hitherto used the cruelty of icy silence to make his precise opposite, the power-mad Russian president, squirm even more visibly as his billionaire cronies suffer from sanctions and the Russian standard of living falls still more.
Potus has given the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) the green light to dispatch thousands of highly-trained experts to install more potent — and visible — deterrents to further Russian encroachments in what they consider their sacrosanct “near-abroad” — notably Poland and the three gutsy Baltic states. I put at 99 per cent likelihood that Obama will make a state visit either to Poland or Lithuania (the latter having been the most courageous in making clear that it will defend itself).
What is Vladimir Putin to do? Accuse America of aggression because the leader of the free world visits an ally? Annex Ukraine and invoke far more stringent sanctions, if not all-out war? Or attack a Nato ally and invoke the “attack on one is an attack on all” clause? Or might such a visit embolden Putin’s so-far silent opponents — say a close-in crony who concludes that enough is enough? Russia lacks a tradition of peaceful change, to make a pointed understatement.
Meantime, every country joining Obama in seeking a world of peaceful progress can contribute. Malaysia, get on with your demand for justice in the shoot-down (only Russian-made artillery could have done it) of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. In a tight world, everything counts. And, in the meantime, we can all be grateful at how one purposeful and brilliant man can make a difference in six short years.
The writer is emeritus professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University in the United States
