Obama needs a Tea Party of his own

There's not the slightest mystery about the sweeping Republican advance in Tuesday's US midterm elections. It's the direct outcome of an epoch-changing crisis and a failed economic model. Six million Americans have fallen below the poverty line in less than three years, official unemployment is close to one in 10, two-and-a-half million people have had their homes repossessed, living standards are dropping and an anaemic economic recovery already risks going into reverse.

Most Americans may not blame Barack Obama for the crash. But they know his spending programme hasn't turned those numbers round, while millions have been drawn to the racialised populism of the ultra-conservative Tea Party movement. In the political space left vacant by Obama and the Democratic mainstream, a big business-funded campaign has channelled rage against Bush's bank bailout and the featherbedding of corporate America into blind opposition to the president's stimulus package.

In reality the stimulus has saved up to 3.3 million jobs, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, even though it represented only a small fraction of the collapse of private demand. It would have needed to be much larger — and combined with far tougher intervention in the banks — to overcome the impact of the credit collapse.

But if that was impossible with a Democrat-controlled Congress, it's out of the question now. Some of Tuesday night's results offer crumbs of comfort that America's latest hard right insurgency could yet consume itself. The defeat of Ilario Pantano, Republican candidate in North Carolina and an ex-marine lieutenant who was hailed by his party as a war hero after killing two unarmed Iraqis in cold blood, is cause for relief — as was the rejection of some of the wilder Tea Party fringe, such as the former self-proclaimed witchcraft dabbler Christine O'Donnell in Delaware.

Democrats will also draw some reassurance from the well-established pattern of first-term US presidents, from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton, who have come back from a bad midterm defeat to win a second presidential term. But the loss of control of Congress is likely to make that more difficult this time, with gridlock and guerrilla warfare aimed at rolling back even Obama's compromised reforms, such as in health care.

Unlike Reagan and Clinton, Obama can't bank on any kind of bounceback economic recovery. As Robert Reich, Clinton's former labour secretary, argues, any shift in the direction of the small-government right in those circumstances will only play into the Republicans' hands. Far better to take his cue from Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, reframe the political debate and challenge the power of big business and Wall Street to grab resources at the expense of the rest.

When it comes to American foreign policy, the impact of the election defeat is less clear-cut. Throughout the election campaign America's multiple international entanglements barely surfaced, even though US casualties continue to rise in Afghanistan and its troops are still dying in Iraq.

Foreign affairs

US presidents who lose control of Congress typically compensate by trying to make their mark abroad, where presidential powers are less constrained. But Obama's international clout will be undermined by a perception of weakened authority at home. In the wake of the president's humiliatingly abortive attempt to convince Israel to halt illegal colony-building in the Occupied Territories, the election result has been especially welcome there, with one Israeli commentator speculating that Benjamin Netanyahu defied Obama in part to boost the chances of his Republican allies in the US Congress.

Despite the obvious contrast in rhetoric and the crucial role played by his opposition to the Iraq war in his bid for power, it is the continuity rather than the contrast with the Bush administration's foreign policy that has been striking in Obama's presidency. Troop numbers have been reduced in Iraq, as agreed by his predecessor, but the occupation goes on. The military campaign in Afghanistan has been sharply escalated, as he promised, and the war on terror dangerously extended.

US forces are now conducting covert operations in a dozen countries across the Muslim world, from Yemen to Pakistan, where Obama has this year alone authorised six times as many drone attacks as Bush did between 2004 and 2007. But when Obama gives the clear instruction that American troops will start to be withdrawn from Afghanistan in July of next year, he is openly defied by his generals, including the Republican-linked David Petraeus.

It is a reminder that the US empire is a system, rather than a policy — and also of the limitations of the power of elected office in a corporate-dominated imperial state.

Obama also encapsulates the dilemma of how centre-left politicians can challenge entrenched centres of power in a period when countervailing pressure from labour and other social movements is weak. The mobilisation of supporters that propelled him to office two years ago was allowed to dissipate. But without such a force — a Tea Party movement of his own — Obama can never begin to fulfil the hopes that were invested in him.

The room for manoeuvre over domestic reform has just been sharply narrowed, though renewed political momentum could still be created for 2012. But he can deliver abroad. If the US president really were to end the occupation of Iraq and begin a genuine withdrawal from Afghanistan next year, that would be a change people everywhere could believe in.