Two distinguished Brits have delivered verdicts on the United States after spending time in the country – in one case 13 years, in the other quick visits to eight cities in two months. Needless to say, the verdict of the zip-through-the-cities traveler, Chris Patten, a former EU Commissioner who is Chancellor of Oxford University, is much more superficial and impressionistic. Both, however, share the common European over-estimation of President Barack Obama’s capabilities.
The 13-year veteran is the outgoing author of The Economist’s Lexington column, who bids farewell to the United States in a piece entitled Two Cheers for America. After conceding that it is presumptuous “to mention oneself alongside the author of the greatest book written about America” (Alexis de Tocqueville), the ex-Lexington then proceeds to do so, and comes to a couple of strange conclusions. He says that American xenophobia is on the rise – a frequent charge by The Economist, which tends to confuse xenophobia with opposition to illegal immigration – although there is little evidence that this is so.
The piece wrongly states that America’s taste for entrepreneurial capitalism “arrived with the first settlers,” whereas the settlers in fact adopted a version of the market economy only after their initial experiments with Marxist-style collectivism failed.
More substantially, however, the author claims that: “The new administration is trying to correct some of the excesses of the Bush years, much as Ronald Reagan corrected the excesses of the Carter years.” This will sound extraordinary to the 40 percent of Americans who identify themselves as conservatives (against 35 percent moderates and 21 percent liberals), many of whom fear that Obama is about to create far worse excesses than Carter ever imagined.
But the article ends, correctly, on an upbeat note. After citing de Tocqueville’s praise for America’s “ability to repair her faults,” it concludes that the United States “still promises much” because of its genius for incubating entrepreneurs. One cheer for Lexington!
Chris Patten, on the other hand, was surprised by the optimism he found in Boston, New York, Washington DC, Houston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, which he attributes partly to traditional American ebullience but more significantly to his belief that: “The economy may look bad, but the president looks great.” (It’s a pretty safe bet that Patten never visited the suburbs, exurbs or small towns, let alone the countryside.)
Patten makes the astonishing claim that Obama “dominates, enthralls, and enthuses the audience of American voters – consumers, workers, investors, one and all.” He frets that Obama’s poll numbers “may start to turn” if there are no signs of economic recovery by year-end. If Patten had stayed a bit longer, he would have found that the plunge has already started.
As USA Today reported July 20, “at six months in office, Obama’s 55 percent approval rating puts him 10th among the 12 post-World War II presidents at this point in their tenures. When he took office, he ranked seventh.” His only two less popular predecessors at this stage were Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
In a report July 21, the specialist political publication Politico said the latest polls showed the public was losing trust in Obama and his Democratic allies to identify the right solutions to the country’s problems. A new Public Strategies Inc./POLITICO poll showed that 54 percent of Americans said they trusted the president, down from 66 percent in March, while those who did not trust him jumped to 42 percent from 31 percent.
The moral of this story is that you’re more likely to get America right if you spend 13 years in the United States, rather than a few weeks in a series of major cities.
