Amanda Foreman: Obama can take comfort from history
[Amanda Foreman is a historian and the author of A World on Fire: an Epic History of Two Nations Divided (Allen Lane).]
When is a defeat actually a victory? When it destroys the enemy's future capacity to fight. Barack Obama can take comfort from this maxim as he contemplates the new reality on Capitol Hill today.
The polls predicted a massive swing to the Republicans and were proven right: 10 governorships, six Senate seats and more than 60 House seats. There has not been such a seismic change in the House for the past 70 years. But it is important to put Obama's defeat in perspective: George Bush lost the House, the Senate, and the majority of state governorships in the 2006 mid-terms, and Bill Clinton suffered a similar drubbing in 1994. Bush was already on the way out, but Clinton went on to win a second term in 1996 – the first Democratic President to do so since Franklin Roosevelt.
So all is not lost for Obama simply because the US electorate has signalled its disapproval. Clinton allegedly declared the morning after the mid-terms: "This can be liberating." A natural conciliator and communicator, Clinton was able to move to the centre and re-fashion his message to suit the mood of the nation. Famously, he declared: "The era of big Government is over", touching on an American preoccupation that has its roots in the Civil War and beyond...
Read entire article at Independent (UK)
When is a defeat actually a victory? When it destroys the enemy's future capacity to fight. Barack Obama can take comfort from this maxim as he contemplates the new reality on Capitol Hill today.
The polls predicted a massive swing to the Republicans and were proven right: 10 governorships, six Senate seats and more than 60 House seats. There has not been such a seismic change in the House for the past 70 years. But it is important to put Obama's defeat in perspective: George Bush lost the House, the Senate, and the majority of state governorships in the 2006 mid-terms, and Bill Clinton suffered a similar drubbing in 1994. Bush was already on the way out, but Clinton went on to win a second term in 1996 – the first Democratic President to do so since Franklin Roosevelt.
So all is not lost for Obama simply because the US electorate has signalled its disapproval. Clinton allegedly declared the morning after the mid-terms: "This can be liberating." A natural conciliator and communicator, Clinton was able to move to the centre and re-fashion his message to suit the mood of the nation. Famously, he declared: "The era of big Government is over", touching on an American preoccupation that has its roots in the Civil War and beyond...