Since Barack Obama first announced his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois, almost two years ago, we have witnessed a series of ”historic moments” — each more portentous than the last. On Tuesday, his inauguration as the 44th president of the United States marks the curtain call on a symbolic storyline in varying degrees dramatic, implausible and impressive.
Since that heady election night, most of the posters and badges supporting him have remained on display — as though to take them down would prematurely surrender his victory moment to posterity. Most bore his likeness in socialist realist style while bearing single word commands like Hope, Believe and Change. After lunchtime on Tuesday that word should say Power. From the moment he lifts his hand and takes the oath, the popular transition from dream to reality, and aspiration to destination, will be complete.
Obama’s supporters will have to wake up to the fact that he has arrived. From that point on, the issue is no longer what he is and means, but what he does.
And there will be a lot to do. The constitutional interregnum between one West Wing occupant and another is not the only transition that has been taking place since early November. The economy has shifted from recession to slump and from laissez-faire to state intervention, while Gaza has gone from an open prison to a mass graveyard. At convenient moments Obama has claimed that there can only be one president at a time. But the truth is that for much of the last two years there has been none. Being a lame duck is one part of George Bush’s tenure that he has taken seriously, even as the country has been crying out for leadership.
So expectations are high. Obama hasn’t even started the job yet and his approval ratings are 83%.
According to a recent Gallup poll, more than half believe he will reduce healthcare costs, double the production of alternative energy, cut taxes, withdraw troops from Iraq, close Guantánamo and make it easier for unions to organise. About two-thirds think he will ensure that all children have healthcare, increase the number troops in Afghanistan, lift government restrictions on stem-cell research, and boost spending to build the nation’s infrastructure.
Seventy percent think they will be better off by the time he has finished his first term. That’s a lot of weight to put on those skinny shoulders.
By the time you read this, some will have already set off in buses from all around the country to attend the inauguration (Washington has issued 5 000 charter bus permits), with many more set to accompany them on charter and commercial flights.
The federal government has declared the event a national emergency. Those who stay at home can see it in 27 cinemas nationwide or attend one of the 3 000 events from Alaska to Alabama.
The only outpouring of British festivity that I can compare it to in my lifetime was the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. However, Americans are celebrating their democratic choice as opposed to their subject servitude.
Not for the first time, ridiculous claims will be made for this particular historical moment. Some will say this could not happen anywhere else, without acknowledging that putting one in three black men born at the turn of this century in jail could not happen anywhere else either. A black man in the White House seems so unlikely precisely because a black man in prison, dead or impoverished is so much more likely.
Some will claim that Obama’s advance shows that anyone in America can make it, regardless of race or class, without acknowledging that, in fact, class fluidity and racial uplift are in fact in retreat, and have been for several years. And yet others will insist that a black face will help promote US interests abroad, without acknowledging that the face of American foreign policy for the last eight years has been Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.
Those who hold that America is a land of boundless opportunity and relentless progress are no fans of fact or history. Pepsi will be using the inauguration to launch its ”optimism project”, with slogans like Yes You Can, and Hope. Ikea has set up an Oval Office in Washington’s Union Station featuring ”fiscally responsible furnishings” with the message: ”Change begins at home.”
In all sorts of ways, from pomp and polemic, this will be a particularly American affair.
”All the domestic controversies of the Americans at first appear to a stranger to be incomprehensible or puerile,” wrote the 19th-century French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville in his classic book Democracy in America, ”and he is at a loss whether to pity a people who take such arrant trifles in good earnest or to envy that happiness which enables a community to discuss them.”
When it comes to God, guns, gays — and often race — this has largely been true. But Obama’s rise has been no local discussion. Globally, his race has served as an emblem for exclusion. Simply take the most marginalised group in any society, let it imagine one of its number rise to the highest office in the land, and you have your own bespoke Barack.
Obama Sorin Ilie Scoica was born on polling day in the Romanian village of Rusciori. ”When I saw Obama on TV, my heart swelled with joy. I thought he was one of us Roma because of his skin colour,” said Maria Savu, his grandmother, who hoped his name would bring him luck. In Ghana John Atta Mills, an opposition candidate running on an agenda of change, produced posters of himself standing next to a life-size cutout of Obama. In Brazil, at least eight black candidates exploited a quirk in electoral law to change their names to ”Barack Obama” in elections in October.
For those on the left who have sneered at this joy, Tuesday is their last chance to join the rest of the people whose liberation they claim to champion.
Anxious to get their disappointment in early and avoid the rush, they have been keen to point out the various ways in which Obama will fail and betray. Their predictions may well prove correct. The best is not the same as adequate. He has been elected to represent the interests of the most powerful country in the world. Those will not be the same interests as those of the powerless.
And yet, in the words of Friedrich Engels: ”What childish innocence it is to present one’s own impatience as a theoretically convincing argument.”
Obama was the most progressive, viable candidate possible in these circumstances. A black American, propelled to office by a mass popular campaign pledging income redistribution and an end to torture and the war in Iraq, has defeated the Republicans and is about to replace the most reactionary president in at least a generation.
The global outpouring of support for Obama suggests a constituency for a world free of racism and war, and desperate to shift the direction of global events that is in dire need of leadership and an agenda. Dancing in the streets on Tuesday afternoon doesn’t mean you can’t take to those same streets in protest from Wednesday.
As one African-American activist said shortly after election day: ”As much hell as we’ve caught over the past few hundred years, we should enjoy this one.” – guardian.co.uk