When change looks more like groundhog day

By Ian Bell
Ian Bell, columnist of the year, on change.

I HAVE taken a pledge. I have promised myself that I will not spend the next four years, and certainly not the next eight, saying: "Barack Obama? Told you so."

Still, I told you so.

Even before the New Hampshire primary I was, poor hack, attempting to record a certain scepticism towards the eloquent senator and his undeniably historic destiny. I was attempting to say that you cannot "oppose" Iraq and endorse Afghanistan. I tried to argue that the heroic mould was broken, long ago, for the making of American presidents.

I might as well have said that Jefferson was something of a creep, and Lincoln an accomplished cynic. Instead, I argued that there was no obvious difference between our Blair in the sweating, grinning flesh, and their Obama in all that cool, gorgeous American theory.

Then I said - though the choice was not mine to make - that Mrs Clinton was the better notion. Nothing to do with principles or probity, obviously. There were no redeeming features to report. I merely believed that a political operator shorn of sentiment would get the big job done. A Truwoman, if you like.

Suddenly, President-elect Obama appears to agree. Amazing. This, you might have thought, requires an explanation. "Change" is Hillary, a Bush defence minister, the old Treasury crew, and some traditional Wall Street muscle? Even the acolytes must begin to wonder over the refulgent hues in that new dawn.

Obama, to be fair, never pretended. They said he was a liberal or a "socialist": he did not. They said he was a dangerously radical peacenik type: he said he would make the world safe for America. But still: Bob Gates, author of the spurious Iraq surge, hard-wired to the military industrial complex, and left in charge of all the many infernal machines? Not the revolution as advertised, perhaps.

We have just been triangulated, yet again. The moral distance between principles, practices and people has been calculated. The White House-in-waiting has run the numbers on those liable to be depressed, assured, or enthused. The result is an Obama cabinet that could only be more conservative if George Bush accepts an emeritus role. First Clown, perhaps. But I told you so.

The President-elect told us too. Grant the man honesty. His virtue amid the global financial scandal has been an absence of panic. It's the Obama style, a good thing for what it is worth, but it is not worth much currently. He's been "reading up on FDR" and suddenly the world is a safer place. Right. But does he possess a single economic strategy that Bush would not have grabbed at? Not yet.

Perhaps he will prove me wrong. In these tales of vaunting political ambition, I like being wrong. I like to imagine an American president who declares, because he can, that all wars are over, that the planet will not burn, and that all the bankers are under close arrest.

Back here, where gravity and reality prevail, the woman deemed unacceptable by the President-elect, the person whose foreign policies were a catastrophe in the making, is in charge of US policy towards all that is foreign.

I have read entire books devoted to the Clinton marriage. They make as much sense, generally, as an essay on my domestic affairs, or yours. But if you invite the chief rival to your presidency into the heart of your administration, and allow that a former spouse-president can come along for the ride, you are either very confident, or very stupid.

In neither case will you be right, necessarily. As it is, those most liable to enthuse when Obama sticks to the script have enthused wildly, of late. We anoraks use The Economist as a yardstick in such matters. Last week, that newspaper described the new-deal economic team as "stars of the profession". Terrific.

IQs, it seems, are "off the chart". So smart is Tim Geithner, the latest Treasury secretary, he had nothing whatsoever to do with the global financial catastrophe born in New York when Geithner was busy chairing the New York Fed. Other economists decorating the Obama roster are equally clever, untainted, and blessed - or "well-regarded PhD-holding economists", according to The Economist - with a cunning plan.

This does not count as entirely radical, perhaps. But when "change" is mere repetition, what has changed, exactly, aside from the arrival of a non-white man and two cute kids at the White House? Mr Churlish merely inquires, you understand.

Obama's economists do not strike me as a collective solution to the latest crisis of capitalism. His appointment of Clinton as diplomat-in-chief appears, meanwhile, to acknowledge that new ideas are, as ever, hard to come by. But Robert Gates, the Not-Rumsfeld of the latter Bush years? This all but declares that the President-elect is wedded to the policies against which, lest we forget, he campaigned ferociously.

"Meet the new boss; same as the old boss." You probably know the song. If not, you are about to learn each of the ill-written verses. Consider it an education in the many perils of tempestuous idealism. Told you so, though.

James Jones is a former general. Nothing necessarily disreputable in that, as even I might grant. Jones was once a US Marine. He was also Nato's "supreme" commander. Our Western world tells itself that it depends on such servants. But tell me: how does real liberalism manifest itself in a democracy when the national security adviser is yet another general? Generals, in government? As a matter of principle, you understand.

Obama stands for continuity and for business as usual. "Change" was a slogan and nothing more. The old Washington hands have gathered as though embracing Michael Corleone in the scene that didn't get written. Nothing is kinder, or gentler, or more peaceful on the planet because Barack beat Hillary, and whipped McCain. They are - officially - as one. And remotely controlled drones slaughter Afghan children. The President-elect is "in favour" of that.

It is not for me to snow on anyone's inauguration. The chill Virginia valley weather will perform the function, I think, come January 20. It is not for me, either, to tell good Americans about hopes and dreams. They invented most of those. I can only speak for the forever-suckered other world always hoping for better.

The Obama presidency will hurt the hearts of a great many young people across the planet. He's not Bush: that is not, of itself, enough, and certainly no excuse for the pathetic little countries - this would be one - habituated to expect that other nations will forever do their work. We need to be more.

The global financial endgame is redrawing all maps. In that sense, America is disappearing from the topography of power. Obama will not stem history's tides. He does not even intend to try. The President-elect is already managing crisis.

But the rest of us - smug, comfortable, white, mostly European - had best begin to consider consequences. What might a post-American planet resemble? Democracy in a Chinese style? Autocracy in a Russian fashion? India's eternal complications? Or just European?

It may not sound like it, but I have great hopes for President-elect Obama. I would be happier if he sacked all those he has just hired, but the transition team is not seeking my opinion. I would be happiest if he proved me utterly wrong. But the dream is a fraud, I suspect, and the rhetoric hollow. A pity.

Hillary will do a job. The general will be judicious and sensible. The man from the New York Fed will have a few sensible opinions on the nature of money. And Obama will be lured into the worst of Democrat delusions: he will seek to become a Kennedy. Those creeps should stand as a warning, not as a lure, but America is not my country.

So I stand back, well back, and say, with affection: "Told you so." Obama is not a liberator. He's just - and this is no small thing - another President of the United States of America. God help him.

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