Two years ago today US President Barack Obama was elected and on Tuesday the honeymoon – in which the new president held practically a free rein through the Democrats’ control of both the House of Representatives as well as the Senate – drew to an official end.
Obama’s Democratic Party suffered a brutal defeat in the House but held on to its majority in the Senate where it did, however, concede some of the considerable elbow room it had gained in 2008.
By taking control of the House and gaining strength in the Senate, Republican voters ushered in a new era of a divided government – one that will be more difficult for the President to push his agendas through. No more does he control both houses of congress, and he will now have to extend the olive branch and find a middle ground, as well as new ways of working with Republican lawmakers.
Writings of a Republican victory at Tuesday’s midterm polls had been on the wall for some time now. The populist and ultra-conservative so-called tea party movement has been growing in strength, with Americans rallying to their ranks as unemployment lines and home foreclosures grow longer.
Many of those and others have blamed the economic malaise that is still afflicting the US economy on the Obama administration’s approaches to the multi-faceted problems.
Many, however, forget where those problems stem from.
The current US administration inherited an economy that was freefalling ever deeper into a recession, a practically crippled banking system, an effectively bankrupt car industry, a housing market in an advanced state of decomposition and a budget deficit already in orbit even before the near-trillion dollar stimulus package was factored in.
But just as much as the Opposition here in Malta attempts to flail the government over its conservative approach to economic management, it was the Republicans’ conservative policies that won the day over the more radical ideas, the healthcare reform being a case in point, of the Obama administration.
It was, at the end of the day, voter impatience for an economic rebound that lost the day for the Obama administration. Two years is certainly not enough time to unwind the economic tangle the US has found itself in, but Republican voters saw no real encouraging signs on the horizon.
As with all things that suffer excessive hype, no new world order has emerged and the US has still not found itself back on an economic even keel following Obama’s election. In the real world, the huge paradigm shifts spoken too rashly of when he took power don’t take two years to materialise, more like 20 – millennia in a political context.
This week’s election has shifted the power base in Washington that was so comfortable for the Obama administration in its first two years. The honeymoon is now officially over.