Editorials: Obama's woes.

05 November 2009 <p>IS it all going sour for Barack Obama? This was the president who a year ago seemed to have everything -- a strong electoral mandate for change, a majority in both houses of Congress and a clear vision on climate change, health-care reform and America's place in world. Ten months after taking office the new golden boy of US politics is beginning to look a little tarnished.

He has just seen Democrat candidates defeated in two gubernatorial elections, his health-care and climate change bills are bogged down in a truculent Congress, he stands accused of dithering over Afghanistan and his poll ratings are beginning to slide. White House aides were of course correct to point out that more often than not, midterm elections tend to go against the administration but there are, however, other disturbing signs for Obama.

His Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went off-message during her Middle East tour last week when she praised the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu for an "unprecedented" offer to curb illegal settlement building activity in the occupied West Bank, when her chief Obama has made clear that all such new development must stop entirely. It did not help the anger felt among Arab states that Clinton also failed to praise the Palestinians as well. Her so-called clarification later in Morocco that her comments were designed as a "positive reinforcement" for the Israelis simply did not wash.

Could it be that Obama's defeated challenger for the Democrat presidential ticket is starting to put the knife in and play to that large part of the Democratic Party that still wishes that she and not Obama had won the nomination? Disloyalty, if accomplished subtly, might be no barrier to Clinton having a second run for the party's presidential endorsement if Obama's term ends in failure. And what better way to bring on that failure in the Middle East than to sabotage the president's already faltering ambitions in the region?

Obama dearly needs a breakthrough. The US economy may be for the present out of recession but unemployment is continuing to rise and there is no guarantee that as the government's immense fiscal stimulus is eased, the economy will continue to pick up.

Besides, even though their pocketbooks may be their prime concern, Americans are looking to more from their president. Provisions of the hard-fought health-care bill are being whittled away in Congress, most tellingly in the Senate.

Obama pledged to have the legislation on the statute books by the end of this year. However, to achieve this he may have to make more compromises that will further undermine the effectiveness of this key piece of his election platform.

Next month at Copenhagen, the US is likely to appear without Obama's climate change bill on the statute books. Big business has been throwing every obstruction it can to slow and obstruct congressional debates on the bill. Right-wing Democrats, by and large Clinton supporters, have not been prepared to support their president. Are we seeing a political conspiracy by his supposed colleagues unfolding against Obama?

Iran and N. Korea

EXCERPTS from an editorial in The Christian Science Monitor on Wednesday:

One year after his election, Barack Obama appears no closer to his big hope for a legacy as US president: A determined global effort for a world with zero atomic weapons.

Talks with Russia for further mutual reductions in their arsenals appear stuck. More important, the world's two outlier nations in an effort to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons -- Iran and North Korea -- are as defiant as ever against calls to rein in their nuclear ambitions.

Their obstinacy comes despite Obama's willingness to talk to these two regimes with more openness and potential compromises than did the Bush administration. Iran has now backed away from a recent offer to ship most of its low-enriched uranium to Russia for additional processing and eventual return as fuel for a civilian reactor. And North Korea said this week that it is reprocessing plutonium once again, which would allow it to make another atomic weapon. It had agreed in 2007 to disable its main reprocessing facility in exchange for aid.

These setbacks require Obama to engage more forcefully with other nations -- especially China -- to apply pressure on Iran and North Korea and possibly impose greater sanctions on them. The politically hot issues of health-care reform and a possible troop surge in Afghanistan should not divert the White House from achieving the more important goal of a world free of nuclear weapons. Such a vision was heartily endorsed in 2007 by an eminent, bipartisan group of former top US leaders: Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, William Perry, and George Shultz. And Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last month in large part because of his strong stance on nuclear nonproliferation.

As for Iran, Obama needs to set a firm deadline for the ruling clerics in Tehran to meet the terms set by the West that will ensure a peaceful use of the Iranian nuclear program. And during his trip to China later this month, Obama must gain firm assurances from Beijing that it will use its leverage over its economically weak ally to bring North Korea to multilateral talks for the purpose of dismantling its still-small nuclear arsenal. China must also curb its growing trade with Iran. Such steps are necessary if Obama is to expect much success from a world summit on nuclear terrorism that he promises to hold next March.

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