Obama doesn’t get america’s can do instinct the times
1. Obama doesn’t get America’s can-do instinct
Camilla Cavendish
Last updated at 12:01AM, November 1 2012
Soul-searching voters fear that the President’s social
democracy will be the end of the American dream
As Americans stoically clean up after the ferocious storms that battered places I have
known and loved, from Virginia to Maine, it looks as if the Commander-in-Chief will
salvage his presidency. But only just. Many Europeans are bewildered that Mitt
Romney, with his hardline social views and a tax plan that doesn’t seem to add up, can
be within shouting distance of the White House. The reasons tell us something about
how America sees itself.
The US has not fallen in love with Mr Romney — although Americans are much
happier than Europeans to put successful businessmen into office. The story of this
race is just how disillusioned the country has become with Barack Obama. That “Yes
We Can” has turned into “maybe” was inevitable, given that he had to govern against
the worst economic backdrop since the Great Depression. But there is something else,
too. Not only Republicans but people I would expect to vote Democrat seem to feel that
Mr Obama does not quite grasp the American spirit, the spirit of enterprise.
This has nothing to do with race, but everything to do with a fear that Mr Obama’s
brand of social democracy could cement America’s decline while China eats their
lunch. The general view I get, especially from business people, is that the over-taxed
over-regulated continental Europeans are China’s hors d’oeuvres, but that America has
one last chance to fight back before it is dessert. The question is how.
This race is all about jobs. America has four million fewer people in work than in 2007,
and it hurts. Steve Jobs’ words not long before he died — “those jobs aren’t coming
back” — haunt the land. This is a particular problem for Mr Obama as no Democrat
president has won a majority of the white vote since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 — and
the black, Hispanic and young voters who supported him in 2008 have been hit
hardest by unemployment and repossession.
When Mr Romney stood up in Denver in the first TV debate and said “I know why jobs
come and why they go”, it struck a chord. Viewers who had been told by the Obama
campaign that Mr Romney was an evil billionaire and a religious nut saw on stage a
2. guy who seemed moderate, genial and pragmatic, and who lost no opportunity to
remind them that he had founded a very, very successful business. People liked his
pledges to back small businesses, and the oil and gas companies that President Obama
has tried to curb.
Although the Obama Administration rescued the car industry in Detroit and the banks,
he lacks a clear vision for what his second term can achieve. And his stimulus has not
brought growth on the scale expected. This week’s 2 per cent growth figure is above
some forecasts, but still anaemic for a country that has been the engine of the world
economy. The financial crisis exposed the fact that blue collar wages have been
stagnating for 30 years, hidden by the illusion that house prices were rising. As the
professional class pulls away from the rest — traced in Charles Murray’s book Coming
Apart — the American dream is fading.
The Americans I know seem to be in a deeper period of soul-searching than even after
9/11. Back then, it still felt like an American century. Now, the tilt eastwards is
dramatic. How do we earn our living in the new world, Americans ask? How do we
keep people in work when innovation creates almost no jobs? What does this mean for
our trading relationships with other nations? Yet both candidates’ campaigns covered
too small a canvas, relative to the issues at stake, and have been almost wholly
negative.
Americans are essentially being offered two competing concepts of freedom. Mr
Romney wants to roll back the state and free enterprise, although his numbers fail
alarmingly to compute. Mr Obama believes that you cannot be truly free without the
kind of state help that provides skills and infrastructure. This is what he meant when
he said: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that”; although it also,
dangerously, portrayed business people as selfish .
Most Americans I know subscribe to a bit of both. They do not really want to choose
between a president who has joked privately to David Cameron that his brand of social
democracy makes him more electable in Europe than America — something that his
voters seem instinctively to feel — and a challenger with illiberal views on abortion.
These may or may not encompass Supreme Court Justice Scalia’s view that abortion
should not be a constitutional issue, but a matter for individual states: it would only
take two new Supreme Court judges to be appointed for Roe v Wade to be overturned.
You can’t really understand this election without understanding the deep unease
created by Obamacare. To Brits raised on the NHS, a plan to give the poor proper
health coverage seems wholly admirable. But one New York Democrat told me this
week that “I don’t want the Government to control my healthcare”. And an elderly
lawyer from Louisiana explained to me that his healthcare premiums of $600 a month
will rise to $1,000 under Obamacare, while his Medicare tax will double. He doesn’t
want to pay more for a system that is woefully inefficient.
Obamacare also took the US even closer to the fiscal cliff. While Republican
intransigence over tax rates made it almost impossible to agree a budget, Mr Obama
also failed to reach out across the divide. While Ronald Reagan famously used to drink
regularly with Tip O’Neill, the Democrat Speaker of the House, those who know Mr
