What
are the historical events whose influence has been greatly overestimated?
Barack Obama, America’s first African-American president, thought he could solve America’s long-standing problem of ethnic reconciliation, but he didn’t.
In a sense, after Obama’s eight years in office, the American people chose Donald, and the quality of his eight years in office is also evident.
Obama is a president who is not easy to talk about. Why?
First, he seems to have too many brilliant personal stories, his characteristics, his upbringing, his multi-ethnic background and so on.
Secondly, as a president of the United States, when Obama took over the White House, the United States was in a great era, and the United States in this era needed a change.
His campaign slogan, “Change, yes, we can”, met the perfect expectations of the American people in all aspects.
Third, his own ideas seem to be liberalism and progressivism.
Fourth, his gestures, imbued with the yuppie mannerisms of the East Coast establishment elite, were impressive.
From another point of view, as the president of the United States, not a male model, nor a flow star, in addition to the bright appearance, we should evaluate his ability to act, his policies.
We can open God’s perspective and give a conclusion first. During the eight years of the Obama administration, he has done a lot of things, but he has not done much, and he has succeeded in leaving less behind, especially in the positive and correct aspects.
In a sense, after Obama’s eight years in office, the American people chose Trump, which also shows the quality of his eight years in office.
Let’s talk about two parts first.
The first is about his rise.
Obama’s rise has shown, especially in the 2008 presidential election, the deep-seated changes in American society, as well as the measures taken and problems reflected in the internal affairs of the United States during his eight years in office. When
Obama came out to run for president of the United States in 2008, he was born in 1961 at the age of 47. Running for president of the United States at the age of
47 is also a very young age in American history, so that some people compared him to John Kennedy, who came out of nowhere in the 1960s.
Second, the current situation in the United States in 2008.
Whether it is Iraq in deep trouble, the more anti-terrorism, the more anti-terrorism war, the new geopolitical competition situation in the global scope; since, the financial storm triggered by the subprime mortgage crisis has turned to the economic crisis, which has spread to the real macroeconomic field, and even begun to spread to the global situation.
This creates a very special environment in which the American people want change.
At this time, such a special person came out to campaign, which is very special from his name: Barack Obama has a Hussein, which stems from the multicultural background of his parents’ethnic groups. Father
from Kenya, and mother who can trace her roots to Indonesia. When
Obama was a child, this multicultural and multi-ethnic impact even made Obama smoke marijuana at a very young age, and then later quit. After
quitting, he began to study hard in the 1980s and 1990s, entered Harvard, became chairman of the Harvard Law Review, and graduated from Harvard Law School with the highest honors.
Not to mention the formation of a counterattack, at least perfectly in line with the background of American liberalism and progressivism, how an African-American, mainly through their own learning, grew into the elite of the United States.
Beginning in the 1990s, Obama began to enter politics.
He started out as a senator (part-time) in Illinois and delivered a stunning speech at the Democratic convention in 2004, confirming the sight of a rising star.
Then, with his ethnic advantages and his keen concern for many problems in American society, he began to emerge as a new force in the 2008 presidential election.
At the same time that Obama has emerged as a new force in the Democratic Party, we must talk about a tragic figure in the Democratic Party’s presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton was a high-spirited vow to become the first female president in the history of the United States, but she failed twice.
One loss to Obama, one loss to Trump.
In 2008, though Hillary Clinton seemed poised to emerge this time, there was one mark that would not go away — the mark of the establishment elite at the top.
Previously, there was a saying that after the end of the Cold War, two new political families emerged in the United States.
One is the Bush family, including the elder Bush, the younger Bush, and Jeb Bush, who is going to run later. The governor, the president, and all kinds of positions are basically created among the members of this family.
One is the so-called Clinton family. During
Bill Clinton’s first term, when he pushed for Bill Clinton’s health insurance reform, Hillary Clinton was entrusted with an important task and rushed to the front, which of course led to a serious defeat.
Since then, Hillary Clinton has always presented herself as an aggressive female elite strongman of the establishment in American politics.
However, in the 2008 election, Obama achieved a counterattack.
This counterattack is due to one of Obama’s natural advantages-his ethnicity. The African-American presidential
race has brought a whirlwind of fresh air, making African-Americans, who account for 12% of the total population of the United States, firmly vote for Barack Obama. Obama’s advantage
in the Democratic Party, which advocates identity politics and strives for minorities, has effectively offset Hillary Clinton’s possible competitive advantage in gender politics as a woman. There is another very interesting phenomenon
here.
If you look at Opensecrets, a website that tracks the flow of political donations in the United States.
You will find that during the Obama era, its political donations have very remarkable characteristics: in the first term, when he was campaigning, the source of donations was generally more than 80%, from the so-called individual donations, and there were quite a number of small individual donations of less than $200.
Generally speaking, in the study of the donation behavior of this kind of competitive party politics, this kind of small donation and individual donation can be considered to be similar to some kind of real poll, which reflects the unconditional support of the American people for such a new political figure as Obama, a very strong support from the grassroots.
However, if you break down the industry of the organization of the donation, or the industry of the source of the donation, if you put aside the scattered support of these individuals, the biggest source of support for Obama includes some reasonable, but some unexpected sources.
For example, he himself is a lawyer, so he has received strong support from the Bar Association; for example, he has been a professor of constitutional law in American universities for a long time, so he has received support from the intellectual elite in American universities.
Of course, Obama’s own African identity, coupled with his speech and fashionable appearance, many of his performances are the darling of American public opinion.
More importantly, financial investment institutions like Goldman Sachs have also invested a lot of money in Obama, which means that he has the effective support of large consortia behind him.
In terms of political donations, especially in the first term, because of the high amount of small donations, people usually think that Obama broadly represents the true intentions of the American people.
So at this time, in fact, from the perspective of hindsight, the source of political donations supporting Obama’s campaign reflects a reality-there are actually “two” Obamas.
One is the shell, which is composed of his family background, growth experience, personal color, ethnicity, and his personal charm through his speech.
Including his very famous standardized charming smile, what people see is such an Obama as a symbol of political communication.
For most Americans, at such a special time in 2008, when they see such an individualized political image, they will think that this is what they are looking for.
Since the end of the Cold War, since the election in which Bill Clinton defeated George H. W. Bush, the perfect American president has been pursued.
An idealized politician who can break the deadlock of the establishment and satisfy the American people to share the development of the United States itself and the benefits of its status as the only world superpower after the Cold War.
In other words, what people expect to see under such a bright and beautiful appearance is a political leader who has the ability to match this image.
One is that inside, Obama is a refined egoist, or a real Obama who is more skilled in personal income calculation than he seems, but does not have the ability to govern the president of the United States.
In many cases, it may be possible to call such Obama standard tool man, who to a considerable extent reflects the expectations of the financial and financial forces behind him.
In addition, the subtle differences between his personal image characteristics and his substantive action ability are combined to form a special political leader.
In this process, he has a case in the course of the campaign, which is worth chewing and savoring over and over again, that is, the famous Obama baby. On YouTube
at the time, someone claiming to be an Obama supporter uploaded a video, a beautifully edited video.
A hot so-called “Obama Girl” at the seaside, accompanied by background music, scenery clips, and lyrics to promote Obama’s core proposition-Obama’s health care reform. There is a whirlwind of Obama
on the Internet.
Obama initiated the large-scale use of Internet social media for political elections and publicity mobilization by accepting small political donations through the Internet and using video to publicize policies.
In many studies of American elections, he was called the first Internet president of the United States. Of course, it was later found that “Obama Girl” was not an ordinary “Obama supporter” in the sense of editing a video.
Instead, he found a Hollywood director, invested a lot of resources, shot a huge amount of material, carefully edited and packaged a short film, and then put it on the social media platform for publication and dissemination.
“Obama Girl” reflects a kind of political behavior with Obama’s characteristics, which can be called Obama’s personalized political performance. What
seems to be some kind of expression of true feelings is actually carefully designed.
This elaborate design reflects two very important characteristics of Obama: first, he attaches great importance to the maintenance of his personal political image, and he is very clear about how to meet the needs of the people in the choice of personality, image building, communication language and political aesthetics.
Second, he is very good at launching a prepared political battle on a field, issue or issue of his choice.
This is frontal positional warfare, but the battle he fought was prepared, packaged and planned in advance, and he was particularly good at making it a seemingly on-the-spot, random and personal expression, which greatly enhanced the expectations of the American people for his ability to govern.
This expectation, of course, has brought huge political gains, the most typical of which is that Obama ended up with more than 69 million votes, a record that has now been broken by the 2020 election.
But at that time, people felt that there was a whirlwind in the United States.
When Obama won the election in 2008, the Democrats faced a situation in which they had the presidency in the White House and a majority in both houses of Congress: the Senate and the House of Representatives. In
a sense, this means that the Democratic Party has achieved full governance in the United States.
Generally speaking, the controversy between Republicans and Democrats in Congress and the stubbornness of the so-called relationship between Congress and the White House hardly existed during the Obama administration, giving him a free hand. The situation needed to
govern, at least on this point, is not bad in Obama’s term of office, or even good.
On the other hand, history or the political fate of individuals, as well as the future development of a country, is also very fair.
Obama has such a big advantage card, controlling both the executive and the legislature, that he has a historic mission to solve.
He has a mission to accomplish, and that is to deliver on his campaign promise of change in America.
At that time, the United States faced many problems, the most urgent and tense of which was the financial crisis from 2007 to 2008.
Overall, the financial crisis was structural.
This is because it broke out after the end of the Cold War, starting with Clinton, through George W. Bush, and then during Obama’s term of office. The cycle of
domestic economic development, the policies of finance and real industry, and the sum of monetary, fiscal and tax policies adopted by the United States in promoting the development of finance, real estate and other industries are concentrated in this financial crisis. What is the impact and challenge of
this financial crisis for Obama?
We can understand the financial crisis as a sudden surprise test from above.
Obama’s main campaign platform is Obama’s health care reform, which directly addresses three core issues.
The first problem, and the most intuitive one, is that tens of millions of people in the United States were not effectively covered by health insurance at that time. The
second problem is that there is a very tense and complex relationship between the level of medical care that the American people receive and the costs they continue to bear.
The third problem is that the US government itself is facing the problem of rising costs.
Obama wants to solve the problem of health care, his education reform and the tax reform that goes with it, which are some of the main propositions in domestic politics during his campaign.
The financial crisis, saving the economy of the United States and achieving an effective economic recovery are not within the scope of its preparation, but this question can not be avoided.
So we find that when Obama took office, he adopted a very interesting strategy in the development of domestic policy.
This strategy, you might call it the teleprompter strategy.
Tell a little story, that is, later others found that one of the characteristics and main selling points of Obama is that his speech is very good, and his speech is unscripted. There is a camera
right in front of him, and he doesn’t keep his eyes fixed on the front of him. He will swing his head from side to side in an appropriate rhythm, showing a very standard “eight-tooth smile,” and then with appropriate body movements, let everyone feel that during the whole speech. Obama is unscripted, skillful and able to interact with the audience in real time.
Through this little story, we can see that the so-called “teleprompter strategy” refers to that Obama is very good at unfolding according to the existing script, but he does not have the talent to be a great politician.
As a performing political star, Obama’s abilities were enough, but to be a special president that the United States needed at that time, he needed special operational abilities.
He needs to be able to go off script, to move forward with something that is unexpected but must be addressed if the pre-written script is not being followed effectively.
Objectively speaking, he is not good, and his ability in this respect is relatively poor.
Later, Obama was found out that he did not look forward for a reason. There is a teleprompter on the
left, and there is a teleprompter on the right. This teleprompter is relatively high-tech. It can’t be seen from the back. It’s all words from the front. The words on
both sides are exactly the same, so he looks to the left and to the right, and his facial movements, body language, and eyes are all “adjusted,” or properly trained in advance. The consequence of
this is that after taking office, Obama basically pushed forward the main platforms of his campaign step by step, but for the reform of the entire financial system and the response to the challenges of the financial crisis, Obama basically followed and met the demands of the American consortia and banks behind him.
Some people have put forward various reasons, including that this incident did not break out during his term of office, and that it was more attributed to the former U.S. government, as well as the huge power of the Wall Street financial consortia, the influence and control of the U.S. government, and so on.
The reality is that the bail-out was passed and implemented on the Obama administration’s watch, and for whatever reason Obama agreed to it. A central feature of
the rescue plan is its focus on large financial institutions.
Here is a little digression about the financial crisis. The simplest understanding and understanding of the role of the financial crisis or economic crisis in the capitalist economic system is that it is a kind of destruction to a certain extent.
This kind of destruction, to some extent, has something to do with Schumpeter’s creative destruction.
When the financial crisis occurs, it is a kind of self-correction and repair of the financial system. This kind of self-correction and repair is to solve some problems accumulated in the past in a more extreme way, and then in the process of solving them, its collateral damage and spillover effects will expand.
In the most extreme case, in Marxist terms, this continuous financial crisis of increasing scale and intensity will knock out the superstructure of capitalist production relations and then enter the next stage.
Here I would like to tell you a figure, that is, the basic subprime loan, the non-performing loan in the strict sense, was 600 billion in 2006.
Then through securitization, capitalization, insurance, reinsurance and other layers of things, plus some other things, it became the so-called credit default swap (CDO), with a nominal total of 62 trillion yuan.
From this, we can understand how big the financial bubble faced by the United States at that time. Who played
this financial bubble?
Banks, Wall Street play out, they have already harvested once in the middle, making a lot of money.
Now that the crisis has been shaken out, in theory, it means that those who should go bankrupt must go bankrupt, that is, to be liquidated.
But with the expansion of the so-called “too big to fail” concept, the U.S. government gave priority to Wall Street financial institutions, and Bernanke (then chairman of the Federal Reserve) flew a helicopter to drop money and carried out a broad rescue.
Internationally, the Group of Twenty, including China, met for the first time to discuss the stabilization of US dollar assets and financial institutions under the financial crisis, and all parties began to rescue the source of the financial crisis.
I remember very clearly that when our Department of National Affairs held a seminar at that time, a teacher there said, “In the past, Marx said that the economic base determines the superstructure, and the superstructure has a reaction to the economic base. Look at the changes in the times. When the economic base determines the role and meets the reaction of the superstructure, look at how powerful the superstructure is now.” A group of 20 countries decided to release water together, and the financial crisis was abruptly blocked. Has
this trend been reversed? Looking back
now, that’s not the case. When the
Obama administration pushed the financial crisis back in such a way, it had to be paid for by the people, to be precise, the tax base of the United States. The tax base of the
United States, the core of its tax policy, has always been to solve a problem that you have not solved, that is, to always focus on the middle class, to collect personal income tax. There is a premise for the increase of
personal income tax, that is, the middle class should expand and continue to increase.
If in the context of the financial crisis, the middle class itself for various reasons, is continuing to shrink, but also expect to use them, and can not touch, then how to do?
Borrowing. I’ve seen a chart
before, which is the ratio of the debt of the federal government to GDP.
During the Clinton administration, the ratio went down; George W. Bush went up; but the biggest, the most important, increase was a sharp rise during the Obama administration.
Because Obama did find that he could not collect too much money, but he had to spend a lot of money, and he thought that the thing that cost money had to be pushed all the time.
So he can only solve this problem by increasing the national debt of the United States, which has brought about a very serious problem.
On the other hand, what did Wall Street do when he funded the fatcat?
In 2009, there was a news that a famous financial institution had just been rescued, and the year-end executives paid a dividend of $7.2 million, which gave the American people a great stimulus. Behind this stimulus was the damage to Obama’s expectations.
It was originally hoped that the changes brought about by Obama would benefit the middle and lower classes of the United States and enable ordinary Americans to benefit from your administration.
As a result, as far as the financial relief is concerned, the public’s political expectations for Obama are greatly reduced.
Of course, another thing we have to talk about is health care in the United States.
Health insurance is also a very complex issue, involving very technical details.
For Obama’s health care, we can observe a very interesting phenomenon. As far as the content of the Chinese Internet is concerned, there are two kinds of similar and distinct evaluations, which are in sharp contrast.
A kind of evaluation, similar to something like XX Encyclopedia, using Obama as a keyword, it has a very positive evaluation of Obama’s health care, health care reform, expanding the scope of health care, improving the level of health care and so on; On the other hand, if you look up questions and answers in some forums, including the overall evaluation of Obama’s eight years in office, as well as the discussion about Obama and health insurance reform, you will find very specific cases.
Netizens will show you the bill, the change of the whole health insurance bill in the whole eight years under Obama’s health insurance, from 2008 to 2016, and then make a more detailed and comprehensive analysis of the content of health insurance from the executive level.
These two different evaluations, to a certain extent, represent two Obamas.
One Obama is prepared and organized, and the other is Obama in the process of execution.
The difference between the two is a precise and effective touch on American health care practice. I think this comment on the
forum is quite pertinent.
The first problem is the understanding of the health care system in the United States, which is a privatized health care system.
The so-called privatization means that it is roughly divided into several parts.
The first is the people, who want to get health insurance, and he is the ultimate user. The way
he gets health insurance is partly to buy commercial and market-oriented insurance, and partly to subsidize the welfare given by the government, which is reflected in its insurance coverage.
The second is the business owner in the United States, who provides health insurance for employees and also pays part of the welfare expenses.
The third is the federal government of the United States. The federal government of the United States has the welfare expenditure of medical insurance every year. This welfare expenditure is different from our general understanding. In fact, it is also realized through the payment of commercial insurance companies by the United States government.
The fourth is the commercial companies that provide medical insurance.
The fifth is the medical market, including doctors, hospitals, medical equipment, medical enterprises and so on.
In the United States, which is a market-oriented system with privatized enterprises as the main body to provide welfare security, when we look at medical insurance, we should distinguish two points: the first point is the content and quality of the medical insurance obtained by the people as the main service.
The second point is the cost paid by people, enterprises and governments in order to obtain the corresponding services.
One can be understood as value, and the other can be understood as price. The real problem
in the United States is how to solve the deviation between the price and value of health insurance services-where the government provides and pays for these benefits, and then how these benefits can be translated into perceived benefits for the people, so that the people can get fully satisfied and guaranteed services.
This involves a problem, if the focus does not fall on how to match the price and value of medical services and avoid the deviation between the two, but only on some formal indicators, such as how many people can be covered by health insurance.
Even if we use the way of paying fines without health insurance to promote health insurance coverage, the problem that can not be solved is precisely the overall rise in the price of health insurance and the provision of medical services, which will eventually lead to a very politicized result, which will not please any party.
On the government side, its welfare expenditure continues to go up; on the enterprise side, the motivation of enterprises to voluntarily participate in medical insurance will continue to decline, unless there are strong constraints, otherwise these enterprises will run away; On the individual side, for those middle groups who can not enjoy the real welfare free minimum living allowance because of their family income conditions, the pressure they bear is actually rising.
So the result of Obama’s health care reform is that, politically, because Obama is serious about health care reform, he finally pushed it through Congress.
What is a strong push, that is, in the absence of an agreement between the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States, a mandatory vote was taken by virtue of the Democratic Party’s advantage in Congress.
In the end, the Senate had one more vote for it than against it. After that
, in the narrow sense of the United States Congress, in the broad sense of the domestic politics of the United States, it has brought very bad consequences.
Some commentators believe that because of Obama’s strong push, the Republican establishment, the Republican grassroots, especially the hard-line grassroots represented by the Tea Party (advocating budget reduction), have completely abandoned political cooperation with the Democratic Party.
In other words, the game of political compromise, consultation in advance, political agreement and voting is no longer played.
They began to vote against what Francis Fukuyama later called an age of veto politics in the United States.
Veto politics is such a tear based on the identity party position.
This policy is stimulated by the Democratic Party and opposed because you are a Democrat and I am a Republican. As soon as the
Republican Party did this, the Democratic Party did the same, and after doing the same, Obama himself immediately suffered the consequences.
In this speech to Congress one year, Obama said something like this to Congress. He said, “Our founding father designed the system of separation of powers. It is for balance. It is not for you to paralyze the government. You are paralyzing now.”. To what extent was the legislature paralysed
at that time? Later, the
Republican Party directly began to talk about all kinds of things related or unrelated to this topic, even including such things as reading dictionaries and telephone directories, and they would not allow you to hold meetings or vote.
It is said that before the Obama administration, this kind of thing happened 52 times in Congress, and during the Obama administration, it should have happened 58 times, which is an exaggeration. Another
thing is that during the 2016 presidential election in the United States, represented by Louisiana, there were many post-mortem analyses showing that Trump was able to win a somewhat unexpected victory there, largely because of the bill.
In several States, people received new health care bills the day before the vote. Some of
the medical insurance bills have increased by 30% compared with the previous year, some by 40%, and the most seems to be 94%. As a
result, many families are financially bankrupt the moment they receive the premium bill.
And then the next day, he received a ballot, and the ballot was for Obamacare.
At this moment, the other side says, “One of the first things I did when I came to power was to repeal Obamacare.”.
This undoubtedly led to subsequent results.
For Obama, the third thing he has to do is what his skin color and ethnicity determine.
He is the first African American president in the history of the United States.
He was elected in 2008, when I was in the United States for a year of exchange, doing postdoctoral visits. In January
2009, the whole of Washington — we joked about a politically incorrect remark — the atmosphere in which he was sworn in made you feel that Washington had changed its color. The streets are
full of African brothers, the real sense of this carnival. What kind of scenes do you often see in
that kind of carnival?
It was a long time ago, but it was very impressive.
I’ve seen one of those super stretch Hummers, and the African brothers drive it with the speakers on. It was cold in Washington in
January. He was shirtless, wearing that kind of gold chain, playing roaring rock music in the streets and swaggering through the streets.
He couldn’t dance and sing in the cab, but the hand was shaking outside the window, and there was a feeling that he was about to jump out of the driver’s seat. On the day of
Obama’s inauguration, African Americans poured into Washington from all directions. Looking down
from around the White House, it was really dark, and looking at it from the TV screen, it was really shocking. African-Americans
, too, were somewhat optimistic at the time.
Of course, on the white side of progressivism, they also think that this is a very good opportunity for a president like Obama to at least solve the long-standing problem of ethnic reconciliation in the United States.
However, there have been several cases in the middle, such as self-defense vigilante groups following African American teenagers and then shooting them. After
each incident, we will find that ethnic reconciliation has not been completed.
Because when this incident came out, including later cases like Freud, there were indeed some images of direct conflict, which were more exciting, and it seemed that they could be regarded as scenes of persecution of African Americans.
You will find that these things often lead to a vicious circle in the end, with African Americans, a minority group, taking to the streets, followed by a wave of persecution and killing.
During the Obama administration, several cases were investigated, and it was found that the two sides of the conflict, especially the African-American side as the victim, were not the perfect victims in the general sense, and in most cases there were some problems.
Often in this way, there will be a wave of backlash on the side of some white groups, especially those who have various radical views on the concept of equal rights and disagree with it. The
two sides continue to argue over this issue, and this conflict eventually leads to a deeper tear. The
real problem is how to open higher education, a normal and smooth channel of class mobility in American society, to African ethnic groups in an orderly manner.
Therefore, in fact, under the framework of law and order in the normal operation of society, the task of achieving ethnic reconciliation has not been completed during the Obama administration.
Even in the end, a cycle has been formed-on the side of political correctness, whether minorities or white people who advocate equal rights, it has slowly slipped into anarchism and a kind of resistance to authority. One of the reasons for
resisting authority is racial discrimination, because it is wrong to discriminate against ethnic groups, and the law is also wrong, so the whole thing needs to be rebuilt in a subversive way. The characteristic
of anarchism is that he knows what he is against, but if you ask him to build something, he can’t build it. The
other group, in fact, has some core groups, which are really called Whitesupremacy (white supremacy).
They have the ideas of racism and discrimination, or white centrism.
Those people talked about law and order, and in the end, racial reconciliation could not be achieved, which in theory should be Obama’s most important mission, but it is precisely in this most important mission that he did not do well.
In a sense, we are now eight years after Obama.
Of course, if I say this about Obama, he may be a little unhappy.
I personally think that a very immature view is that Obama is actually a minority absorbed by the so-called white elite group in the United States, the so-called white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
As a political leader, his actions during his eight-year term of office reflect some of the views and understandings of American political elites in high positions on American politics. The core feature of
these views and understandings is that he has some advanced or universal nature in the level of values, ideas and understandings, or reflects some beautiful ideas and ideas of progressivism and liberalism in American history.
These ideas and concepts, in the specific social environment of the United States at that time, basically failed to translate into substantive policies, let alone achieve change.
It has an inherent political structure, but it has to meet the people’s expectations of such a goal, so in the end it has become a more refined formalism.
I remember very well that there was a talk show in the second term of the Obama administration. Before
the host asked Obama to come on stage, he joked first.
Obama’s first-term campaign slogan was “Change Yes we can.”.
After he came to power, when it was implemented, the sentence became “Change Yes we can, but”.
That is, the promise is very good, that is, as soon as it is carried out, he will “but.”. After
about two sentences, the moderator threw out a question, and Obama blurted out, “Yes we can, but” without saying the rest. As soon as
this statement came out, the whole audience burst into laughter. The impact of
the roar of laughter was so significant that Obama was stunned.
This scene has a certain symbolic significance, that is, the Obama administration is an administration that the United States stands at a critical moment in history to take over the White House.
Since the end of the Cold War, as far as the historical development stage of the successive presidents of the United States is concerned, Obama is standing at a juncture, and the United States will enter a period of substantial relative recession or relative decline; On the other hand, if the United States can effectively overcome some of the shocks and challenges at that time, it still has a huge advantage, and the dividends it reaped during the end of the Cold War may still allow the United States to enter a new rising stage.
You can assume that if not Obama wins, but McCain wins, the direction of history will change a little differently.
Of course, there is no way to assume, because in fact, first, Obama won the election, and the American people made their own choices in the election based on what they saw.
Second, after taking over the White House, Obama made his own choice. In fact,
a performing politician who does not have the ability to match this position, but has the ability to mobilize, organize and call in the form of expression and packaging, has entered the White House, bringing the United States into a very special stage of development.
In domestic affairs, after eight years in power, Obama failed to pull the United States out of the quagmire of the financial crisis in 2007 and 2008 in a substantive way.
He has achieved a limited recovery to some extent, but he has not been able to achieve the changes he promised on many issues, such as health care, tax revenue in the United States, education, and ethnic reconciliation, which are particularly important.
It has been doomed that his eight years in power will produce a result that he may not have expected.
On the other hand, during these eight years, the United States also experienced a very unique development process in its diplomacy, which made the United States inevitably move towards the turning point that triggered dramatic changes in the development stage after the end of the Cold War.
. Focus on not getting lost ~
