Obama deserves his insecurity and the disaster that follows
The turmoil is related to the US, and it is seeping into the US. The response from the Obama administration has been abysmal. It is one reason why ''La Inseguridad'' now also describes the state of the Obama administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress.
Just as Obama made history two years ago, this week he could make negative history with a monumental rejection of his ''politics of hope'' in the US midterm elections.
If the opinion polls are right, the Republicans will not just win the 39 seats they need to take control of the House of Representatives, they could win more than 54 seats. That is the threshold to watch for. It is the record number of seats lost in mid-term wipe-outs for the Democrats in 1992 (when Bill Clinton was president) and 1946 (Harry Truman) in the era of modern two-party politics.
I will not be crying for Obama. In November 2008 I wrote in this space: ''If I were voting in the US presidential election I would vote for [Barack] Obama, despite his paltry legislative achievements.''
Since becoming President his legislative achievements have been the opposite of paltry. They have changed the country, and quickly. He has introduced sweeping healthcare reform, something the Clintons could not do in eight years. He also oversaw the federal government intervention after the global financial crisis in 2008, which stopped a meltdown on Wall Street and prevented unemployment from rising to 10 per cent and beyond.
But that's the good news. There is plenty of bad. On Tuesday, when America votes in races for 37 of the 100 Senate seats, all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, and 38 governorships, the Democrats could even lose what had seemed an impregnable 57 to 41 majority in the Senate (there are two independents).
For the Democrats, their own ''La Inseguridad'' began in earnest in January this year, when, in a special election held to fill the vacancy left by the death of Senator Ted Kennedy in the Democratic stronghold of Massachusetts, a Republican, Scott Brown, won the seat. That is when the Democrats first understood the distant thunder of the political waterfall that now confronts them. Nothing they or the President have done in the ensuing 10 months has stopped the drift.
Midterm elections are treacherous most of the time. Over the past 17 elections, the party holding the White House has lost an average of 28 House seats and four Senate seats. But to lose twice that many seats will be a debacle, and a loss of control of Congress.
One reason will be the federal government's failure to secure the southern border, and thus stem the tide of illegal immigration and crime coming from Mexico.
The issue has become white-hot in Nevada, where the powerful 70-year-old Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, a veteran of 24 years in the Senate, is fighting for survival against a state politician, Sharron Angle, one of several conservative Republican women who have caused national pain to the Democrats.
Angle has gone for the viscera. She is running campaign ads showing Mexican gang members, in all their tattooed, menacing glory, as the personification of the failure of the Democrats to take control of the border. Territorial sovereignty is a game-breaker, and failure carries a high political penalty, as Australians well know.
The Obama administration has combined a soft and cautious policy on border protection with hard campaigning for the Hispanic vote. Angle's ads are payback and have received national attention. Her campaign has also been strongly backed by the former Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, but while the media have obsessed over Palin, she is not even the first or second-most interesting glamorous Republican woman making waves in this election campaign.
The most interesting is Nikki Haley, 38, who was born Nimrata Randhawa. Her parents were born in the Punjab and migrated from India. She is a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives and is running for governor, traditionally a Democratic stronghold.
Another is Michele Bachmann, the first Republican woman to represent the state of Minnesota in Congress, who has managed to combine a career in elected politics with raising five children and fostering another 23. Highly telegenic, she has proved a major drawcard for Republicans nationally.
These women have proved politically seductive in the context of an energised grassroots animated by a real unemployment rate of more than 10 per cent, a housing market at its lowest ebb since the Depression, mammoth federal debt of historic size, a mammoth federal budget deficit, and chronic job insecurity. All this has been compounded by several monumental political blunders by Obama.
His first was to expend an enormous amount of energy and political capital on a healthcare bill, which created a huge new entitlement program at a time when the economy was under siege and the nation was deep in red ink.
The second error was to tighten banking laws to the point where credit dried up, small business were starved of cash and US corporations, uneasy, have hoarded a trillion dollars in cash.
There is so much more to say about The Insecurity, but at the core it is the defection of independent voters, en masse, away from the Democrats, that could turn ''La Inseguridad'' into ''El Desastre''.
Nov. 1, 2010