100 Days – the real test is yet to come

The symbolic 100th day of the Obama Administration brings to a close the first chapter in the remaking of America — a story that ranks historically with Japan’s abandonment of emperor worship after World War II, or the collapse of communism in Russia.

In both those cases, nations and societies were irretrievably changed.

In the United States, Barack Obama came to office after twenty years of a voracious free market feeding frenzy that enriched a small minority but came close to bankrupting the country both financially and morally.

At the 100th day, Obama is being measured by how well he’s dealing with the problems he’s inherited. Public opinion polls show he has the approval of nearly two-thirds of voters. Support for the Republic party has shrunk to a historic low of 24 per cent.

From Day 1 in office, when Obama confirmed he would close Guantanamo, he has worked hard at turning around a country that clearly had lost its way in respect both to its global obligations and its treatment of its own citizens.

The obstacles Obama faced on January 20 were — and remain — enormous:

• Putting to rights a corrupt financial system that brought on the worst economic crisis in seventy years
• Overcoming almost universal distrust for America’s intransigent approach to its international treaty obligations and the rule of law
• Extracting U.S. forces from Iraq after having inflicted on the people of that country a toll vastly greater than the losses of 9/11 — for which they had no responsibility
• Stemming the growth of Taliban and other Islamic extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan — issues ignorted by the Bush gang (there was no profit in it)
• And dealing with a myriad of urgent social and political reforms, from health care to education, poverty and illegal immigration.

Today, the champion of free enterprise and rugged individualism depends on government intervention to save its battered automotive sector. Business and labor are pleading for socialism. Nothing like this has ever been seen before in the United States.

In President Obama’s rush to deal with all these problems, there’s been fear that he’s trying to do too much, too soon.

One hundred days is too short a time to measure the effectiveness of his measures, or to judge whether they’ll turn out to be a palliative, or a cure. But there are signs of incremental success in everything the White House has tried to do. No failures, no disasters yet.

The economic stimulus will eventually work. American troops will leave Iraq. The health system will be changed, if not reformed. Side issues, like Somali pirates and swine flu, will come and go.

But it is Afghanistan, the one place where Barack Obama has signalled an unqualified commitment to exercise American military power, that could prove this President’s undoing.

Until a trustworthy domestic alternative to the Taliban emerges — and there seems to be none at present — it is hard to envision how sending more troops there will have any effect.

Containment, not capture, may be the best that the world can expect. How President Obama will comes to terms with this realitywill go a long way to determining how history will judge his administration.

One hundred days have passed. The real test is yet to come.