Obama doesn’t get America’s can-do instinct

Camilla Cavendish

Last updated at 12:01AM, November 1 2012

Soul-searching voters fear that the President’s socialdemocracy will be the end of the American dream

As Americans stoically clean up after the ferocious storms that battered places I haveknown and loved, from Virginia to Maine, it looks as if the Commander-in-Chief willsalvage his presidency. But only just. Many Europeans are bewildered that MittRomney, with his hardline social views and a tax plan that doesn’t seem to add up, canbe within shouting distance of the White House. The reasons tell us something abouthow America sees itself.

The US has not fallen in love with Mr Romney — although Americans are muchhappier than Europeans to put successful businessmen into office. The story of thisrace is just how disillusioned the country has become with Barack Obama. That “YesWe Can” has turned into “maybe” was inevitable, given that he had to govern againstthe worst economic backdrop since the Great Depression. But there is something else,too. Not only Republicans but people I would expect to vote Democrat seem to feel thatMr Obama does not quite grasp the American spirit, the spirit of enterprise.

This has nothing to do with race, but everything to do with a fear that Mr Obama’sbrand of social democracy could cement America’s decline while China eats theirlunch. The general view I get, especially from business people, is that the over-taxedover-regulated continental Europeans are China’s hors d’oeuvres, but that America hasone last chance to fight back before it is dessert. The question is how.

This race is all about jobs. America has four million fewer people in work than in 2007,and it hurts. Steve Jobs’ words not long before he died — “those jobs aren’t comingback” — haunt the land. This is a particular problem for Mr Obama as no Democratpresident has won a majority of the white vote since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 — andthe black, Hispanic and young voters who supported him in 2008 have been hithardest by unemployment and repossession.

When Mr Romney stood up in Denver in the first TV debate and said “I know why jobscome and why they go”, it struck a chord. Viewers who had been told by the Obamacampaign that Mr Romney was an evil billionaire and a religious nut saw on stage a

guy who seemed moderate, genial and pragmatic, and who lost no opportunity toremind them that he had founded a very, very successful business. People liked hispledges to back small businesses, and the oil and gas companies that President Obamahas tried to curb.

Although the Obama Administration rescued the car industry in Detroit and the banks,he lacks a clear vision for what his second term can achieve. And his stimulus has notbrought growth on the scale expected. This week’s 2 per cent growth figure is abovesome forecasts, but still anaemic for a country that has been the engine of the worldeconomy. The financial crisis exposed the fact that blue collar wages have beenstagnating for 30 years, hidden by the illusion that house prices were rising. As theprofessional class pulls away from the rest — traced in Charles Murray’s book ComingApart — the American dream is fading.

The Americans I know seem to be in a deeper period of soul-searching than even after9/11. Back then, it still felt like an American century. Now, the tilt eastwards isdramatic. How do we earn our living in the new world, Americans ask? How do wekeep people in work when innovation creates almost no jobs? What does this mean forour trading relationships with other nations? Yet both candidates’ campaigns coveredtoo small a canvas, relative to the issues at stake, and have been almost whollynegative.

Americans are essentially being offered two competing concepts of freedom. MrRomney wants to roll back the state and free enterprise, although his numbers failalarmingly to compute. Mr Obama believes that you cannot be truly free without thekind of state help that provides skills and infrastructure. This is what he meant whenhe said: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that”; although it also,dangerously, portrayed business people as selfish .

Most Americans I know subscribe to a bit of both. They do not really want to choosebetween a president who has joked privately to David Cameron that his brand of socialdemocracy makes him more electable in Europe than America — something that hisvoters seem instinctively to feel — and a challenger with illiberal views on abortion.These may or may not encompass Supreme Court Justice Scalia’s view that abortionshould not be a constitutional issue, but a matter for individual states: it would onlytake two new Supreme Court judges to be appointed for Roe v Wade to be overturned.

You can’t really understand this election without understanding the deep uneasecreated by Obamacare. To Brits raised on the NHS, a plan to give the poor properhealth coverage seems wholly admirable. But one New York Democrat told me thisweek that “I don’t want the Government to control my healthcare”. And an elderlylawyer from Louisiana explained to me that his healthcare premiums of $600 a monthwill rise to $1,000 under Obamacare, while his Medicare tax will double. He doesn’twant to pay more for a system that is woefully inefficient.

Obamacare also took the US even closer to the fiscal cliff. While Republicanintransigence over tax rates made it almost impossible to agree a budget, Mr Obamaalso failed to reach out across the divide. While Ronald Reagan famously used to drinkregularly with Tip O’Neill, the Democrat Speaker of the House, those who know Mr

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Obama admit that he can seem aloof: brilliantly cerebral at G20 summits but less keento have a beer. This has helped Republicans to argue that Mr Romney would be betterplaced to resolve the deficit.

If Americans are serious about regaining their place in the world they probably need toaccept that some of President Obama’s industrial policy has worked, while also facingup to Mr Romney’s arguments for simplifying taxes and reforming social security andMedicare.

Whoever wins on Tuesday, it is pragmatism, not ideology, that will bring Morning inAmerica again.

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