Adieu to Bush's long reign of error

It's been a long, bruising and at times acrimonious campaign, but strictly speaking it will not end ten days from now as Americans go to the polls to vote for their next chief executive.

When Barack Obama wakes up on November 5 to discover, as most likely will happen, that he is the 44th president of the United States, he and his advisers will have awaiting them that arduous, 77-day transitional period between Election Day and Inauguration Day to sort out the problems they will be inheriting from the former administration, and how to meet the difficult challenges of forming a new government. They most decidedly have their work cut out for them.

George W. Bush's 8-year reign of error has left the country drained, with an ailing economy, a troubled health system, an erratic immigration policy, a woeful energy and climate programme and, abroad, two wars and a catastrophic decline in America's global image, along with a host of other foreign policy issues from Iran to North Korea, Palestine to Pakistan.

Those are the kind of problems you inevitably would inherit from a president with the intellectual acumen of a gnat who had allowed himself, during his disastrous tenure, as America was progressively losing its ability to exercise moral leadership around the world, to be led around the nose by scamming neocons, men imbued with a blinkered ideology and imperial hubris.

It is no wonder that former President Jimmy Carter vociferously declared that Bush was by far the worst chief executive ever to occupy the White House, or that his approval ratings had bottomed out well over three years ago.

Moving from how to get elected to how to lead is not easy. The financial meltdown of recent weeks, which has been compared to the Great Depression, is clearly not a piece of cake. Hyperbole aside, not since Franklin D. Roosevelt came to office in 1933 during the depths of that depression has a new president confronted a similar challenge.

But President Barack Obama (and we have to get used to the title) is a confident, articulate and informed young man who will make history, given the mandate he will have been given from a resilient country hungry for "change" and assured that it "can", a country that will rely more on soft power abroad, rather than the rule of the gun, and on equity at home, rather than golden parachutes for the rich.

Obama, part black, part white, part Muslim, part Christian, part African, part Anglo, part leftist part pragmatist, is about as American as you can get these days, and he will bring America back to Americans, the America of Jeffersonian principles ("war is the sport of tyrants"), the America that the French immigrant to the United States, Hector St. John de Crevecouer, described as far back as the 18th century as a land where "individuals of all countries are melted into a new race of men", the America we call today a "nation of nations".

No other social system in the world is possessed of that kind of hybrid vigour. Not since President John F. Kennedy (whose Catholicism at the time, like Obama's ethnicity today, was considered exotic, if not troubling) has a new chief executive epitomised so much promise.

Lest we forget, there are still those pockets of bigotry around - and they will remain around, since no society will ever be free of them - harbouring Islamophobes of all kinds, including Islamophobes in John McCain's campaign, who have dismissed Obama as a Muslim, as if the term is an epithet of sorts. Last week, interestingly, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who is a Republican, but who nevertheless has endorsed the Democratic candidate, addressed himself to that issue in an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press".

Bigoted view

"I'm troubled not by what Senator McCain says", he asserted, "but by what members of the party say. And it is permitted to [say] such things as 'well, you know that Mr Obama is a Muslim".

Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he's a Christian... But the really right answer is what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no, that's not America. Is there something wrong with a seven-year-old Muslim American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, 'He's a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists'. This is not the way we should be doing it in America".

To be sure, these bigots are entitled, bigots though they may be, to say whatever the heck they want to say. I use the word "entitled" in a charitable sense, by way of people's First Amendment right to express themselves freely.

To imply, however, that these folks can shove their prejudices down my throat, would, I feel, demand from me charity of a higher order. If, for example, I were to have a chance encounter with one of these individuals, say, at Angles, my watering hole in Adams Morgan, would I talk to him, considering it a small price to pay for a bit of campy, uninhibited conviviality? Yes, I would. Would I let him marry my daughter? Over my dead body!

Unrepentant bigots, washed-up Republicans, and an outgoing president aside, Obama's presidency, with help from a compliant Democratic Congress, will herald a new, zestful and exciting chapter in American history. Trust on this one. And the show will begin ten days from now. So roll the credits.

Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He lives in Washington D.C.