AS BARACK HUSSEIN

ROGER COHEN
INTELLIGENCE


AS BARACK HUSSEIN Obama takes office as the 44th President of the United States, and its first African American leader, he has already achieved something remarkable: the restoration of the mythology of American possibility.

In a bleak season, with American luster dimmed and the country facing the worst economic downturn since the 1930s, this symbolism is as important as the ballooning unemployment and the two wars that face him. With his Kenyan father, American mother and Muslim grandfather, Obama speaks to a world in flux. From Malaysia to Mexico, Obama seems somehow familiar. He looks more like the guy at the local corner store than the guys on dollar bills. As such, his rise declares to one and all that there are still no bounds to what can be achieved in the United States.

This is important because global hopes are still vested in the American idea. China and India may be rising but their ascendancy has not brought any magnetic new message. Hope in America is not illogical. The United States is a transformational power or it is nothing. As Richard Hofstadter has observed,“It has been our fate as a nation not to have an ideology, but to be one.”

To me, America at its best is the overcoming of history, the leaving behind of war and barriers, toward a future freed from the cruel gyre of memory repeatedly plunging the Middle East into wars of retribution. It is the absorption of one identity in something larger - the notion, as Obama has put it, that “out of many, we are truly one.”It is a place better than President George W.Bush’s land of shadows where a leader entrusted with the hopes of the earth cannot find within him a solitary phrase to uplift the soul.

Language inspires and Obama wields it better than any recent president. I do not think the words“war on terror,”which is in effect war without end, will fall often from his lips. The phrase contained within it the seeds of Guantanamo and an imperial presidency: Obama wants to close those chapters. The“with-us-oragainst- us”paradigm is dead.

Obama spent only 10 years of his adult life in the split world of the cold war, double that in a post-Berlin Wall world of growing interconnectedness. I expect Obama to be the first United States leader to govern with a strong sense of the global conversations that make online sociability a powerful political force.

The problems he faces are overwhelming. Seldom has so much hope encountered so much anxiety. Which prevails will depend on the quality of Obama’s leadership and his capacity to go on doing what he did in a long campaign: learn.

With 5.5 million U.S. homes unsold, Americans deluged in debt, and stock-linked U.S. retirement savings decimated, recovery is certain to be slow. The jobless rate could reach 10 percent this year. Two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, will not end tomorrow. Gaza has brought the Middle East to boiling point once again and in Iran the uranium-enriching centrifuges still spin.

Confronted by all this, Obama will have to do more than set out new ideas. Early in his presidency, he will have to lay out, to Americans and the world, a new paradigm, something that goes beyond the war on terror and draws the partners of a re-imagined United States, less powerful but still indispensable, into a shared push for greater prosperity and security. He might call the speech:“The promise of the 21st century.”It is past time for a new beginning.