Alex Massie Alex Massie

Obama’s Culture War

All American Presidents are elected on a platform of hope and change. Each arrives in Washington promising to be, in the words of George W Bush, “a uniter not a divider”. But few took possession of the White House quite as heavily weighed down by the burden of expectation as Barack Hussein Obama. The hopes that accompanied Obama’s election were so extravagant that it became all but inevitable that the 44th President would prove a disappointment once the campaign ended and the torturous business of government began.

Even by that standard, however, Obama’s first year in office could be considered under-whelming. His approval rating, once comfortable, has hovered around the 50% mark for months and there is a growing sense that the President is not the transformative figure he once promised to be. Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts was the last straw for a Presidency that, pundits tell us, is now all but doomed.

Despite that, the headline figures are misleading. According to one recent poll the President is popular in most of the country. In the north-east, more than 80% of voters approve of his performance. In the midwest 62% of voters have a favourable view of Obama and so do 59% of voters in the west. Only the south bucks this trend. There, 67% of the electorate has an unfavourable view of the President. There are still, as John Edwards would put it, “Two Americas” and Barack Obama’s popularity in one is matched, almost exactly, by the scale of his unpopularity in the other.

Among the many consequences of Obama’s victory is this: the south has been humbled. For the first time in decades southerners are almost entirely excluded from senior administration positions and the Congressional leadership. For half a century the south (including Texas) and the west have dominated the White House; Obama is perhaps the first President elected since John F Kennedy who has no relationship with, or instinctive sympathy for, the white working class culture of the south that has been a dominant influence on American political life.

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