Obama’s America will be more equal but less mighty

Reihan Salam says that the President-elect is no socialist and it was desperate of McCain to claim as much. Obama’s policies more closely resemble European social democracy — with the attendant risk of economic sclerosis in the face of Asian competition

While walking to work on the morning of Election Day, I was struck by the number of times I encountered Barack Obama’s beaming countenance on posters and bumper stickers. To be sure, I live in a neighbourhood in the District of Columbia that is particularly thick with the politically obsessive, but I’ve also encountered striking portraits of America’s next president across the country. Will the Obama iconography fade away as voters grow disillusioned? Or will Obama directly appeal to his supporters to march in the streets when he faces down a recalcitrant Congress? Given the sanity and scepticism of most Americans, I tend to think that the manically high levels of pro-Obama enthusiasm will eventually die down.

But Obama will certainly enjoy an extended honeymoon, not least because he promises to transform America dramatically for the better, from delivering high-quality healthcare to all to scrubbing the atmosphere of dangerous carbon emissions. Given his meteoric rise, and given how brilliantly he ran his campaign, one has to assume that Obama will make a serious effort to accomplish these and other truly daunting tasks. The most wild-eyed Obamaphiles believe that their man will transform America into a new urbanist paradise, in which people of every hue commute by solar-powered light-rail trains to green-collar jobs located in shining new brownfield developments, where gleaming new factories will manufacture plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. Other nations will marvel at how enlightened we’ve become, and they will strive mightily to live up to our Obamaite ideals. Shortly after Obama leaves office, a grateful nation will honour him by putting his noble visage right alongside that of Abraham Lincoln on the $5 bill.