Daily Times

President Obama’s re-election seems to have further polarised the country’s political establishment represented by the Democratic and Republican parties. Obama certainly is in a better position politically and seems determined to have his way, as much as possible, on crucial issues. And the most important issue facing the United States is the parlous state of its economy. Broadly, there are two viewpoints on how best to handle the economy. On the Republican side, the emphasis is mostly on controlling and cutting spending to reduce the budget deficit and the debt, which, in the Republican parlance, means cutting social spending, including health and welfare. The Obama administration on the other hand does not want the economy to sink into recession with thoughtless spending cuts and favours raising more revenues through increasing taxes on the rich. Obama has made some advance in this direction through a compromise deal with the Republicans to raise taxes on incomes of over $ 400,000 annually ($ 450,000 for couples).

In the next round of Republican political warfare against the Obama administration, they are once again going to take issue on the country’s debt ceiling by refusing to raise it, which could create a situation of potential default by the US on its debt. Last year, when the debt ceiling was not raised until the last moment, it cost the country a rating downgrade of long-term US debt. A potential debt default was avoided when, at the last moment, a patch up deal was made to last till after the presidential election, which is now unravelling.

The Republicans in the Congress, with their comfortable majority in the House of Representatives, want to bargain on the debt ceiling limit to force the government into drastically cutting health and welfare spending. Obama has made it clear that he would not let Congressional Republicans use the debt limit as leverage on spending cuts. Hence, the two sides are locked into seemingly irreconcilable positions. In the past, the debt ceiling was generally raised without any fuss. But sensing Obama’s political vulnerability close to the election, the Republicans decided last year to make it into a political issue and to make Obama the focus of the country’s economic malaise.

Why did they target Obama? First: Obama’s election in 2008 shocked the country’s conservative white constituency. They never accepted him as a legitimate American president and continued to question his credentials. He was an easy target with doubts raised about his US birth and being from the ‘wrong’ race. And his talk about raising taxes on the rich and making healthcare accessible for the relatively less well off made him into a dangerous socialist. He seemed set on destroying the American dream of every one being able to become rich in the US’s freewheeling capitalist society. This brought upon him the wrath of the rich and powerful of the US’s conservative political establishment and led to the rise of the Tea Party movement, which showed its political muscle in the 2010 elections when a sizeable number of Tea Party-endorsed Republicans were elected to the House of Representatives.

Obama’s political charm was wearing out, which led the Republicans to become even more obstructionist, believing that the White House was there for the taking at the 2012 election. At the same time, the economy was not making any appreciable dent in the country’s high unemployment rate. The political honeymoon with Obama seemed really over with a large section of the American electorate. In other words, the country’s political polarisation was becoming deeper, with the Republicans baying for blood, politically speaking.

But the Republicans had difficulty selecting their nominee, leading to a long process when each one of the potential presidential hopefuls turned on each other, which gave the Obama camp a tactical advantage. And when Mitt Romney was finally nominated as the Republican presidential candidate, his own camp had already bruised him. Even though a moderate Republican, he had to burnish his conservative credentials by talking up the Tea Party kind of extremism. At a party fundraiser attended by some of America’s richest people, he debunked the 47 percent of the American people who, in his view, lived on government handouts.

Romney came out against Obama’s healthcare programme that was, indeed, modelled on his own successfully tried and tested scheme when he was a state governor. His failure to pay his proper taxes and refusal to divulge the rate of payment over the last 10 years did not help his image. And by supporting the hard Republican line on Latino immigrants, he managed to deliver a big chunk of Latino voters to Barack Obama. With Afro-Americans solidly behind Obama, and Latinos favouring him by a large margin, the Republican Party managed to turn potential victory into a real defeat for Mitt Romney.

Even after their defeat, the Republicans do not seem to have learnt much, as the country goes through its crisis of governance with the Republicans set to oppose Obama on raising the country’s debt ceiling. A good number of the Tea Party constituency still believe that by consistently opposing Obama on a whole range of issues like the economy, gun control, immigration, the environment or any other matter where he is perceived to be advocating flexibility and liberalism — which they confuse with socialism — they are upholding American values against their president’s dangerous ideas inimical to the country’s democracy and way of life.

But many Republicans have been shaken by Obama’s victory and they certainly would like to moderate their party’s image of negativity. For instance, they seem to be gradually coming around to Obama’s position to let children of illegal Latino immigrants, who have grown up in the US, qualify for citizenship. Having lost a chunk of the Latino votes to Obama during the recent election, they are inclined to take note of the country’s changing demographics and make necessary adjustments for electoral reasons, because the Republican Party’s electoral future will be increasingly dicey as the electoral mathematics of demographic change is likely to turn the whites into a minority by about 2050.

However, the Tea Party constituency — and they are a powerful component — is not keen on it because they believe that the Latino and other non-white immigrants have come into the US not for its electoral politics but for its unique values and the potential of fulfilling the American dream. And if that dream is debunked and values compromised, there is not much left of America’s uniqueness as a blessed country. In other words, the Republicans are divided between pragmatism and a hard line that spurns compromise. And this will dog American politics, with the Republicans seemingly deciding to take a tough line on the debt ceiling by keeping the country on a financial drip of quarterly renewal, which is likely to make the country increasingly ungovernable.

In this game of political chess, the people will suffer the most with the country held to ransom by political extremism.

The writer is a senior journalist and academic based in Sydney, Australia. He can be reached at sushilpseth@yahoo.co.au