Still Time for Obama to Let His Allies Help Him: Liberation, France

With President Obama confronting a confluence of issues that appear to threaten his chances of having a successful term in office, his supporters in Europe are also sounding alarmed.

For France’s Liberation, columnist Bernard Guetta writes in part:

“The likelihood is that Obama has already failed to become a new Roosevelt, an architect of a modern New Deal that without increasing health spending who would offer some form of protection against disease for the nearly 60 million Americans who have none. A bad compromise is the only thing in the works. The polls are becoming worrisome for the White House. And doubts have set in just as the horizon is darkening abroad.

“… weakened as he is, he finds himself being scrutinized in the international stage. From Jerusalem to Teheran via Moscow, Beijing, Paris, London and Berlin, all the important capitals that matter are telling themselves that they don’t have to worry about Obama and that they have a free hand – a sentiment that benefits the Israeli-Palestinian p”eace process about as well as it contributes to progress with Iran.

Then, suggesting that America’s friends would help if asked, Guetta writes:

“America can play more of a leading role now, by combining its power with others and choosing allies with which it can cooperatively reach decisions. But this idea is still so foreign that even a visionary like Barack Obama hasn’t even considered it. There is still time.”

By Bernard Guetta

Translated By Elise Nussbaum

September 2, 2009

France – Liberation – Original Article (French)

Eight months is a short time. Barack Obama still has another forty before him to end his term as brilliantly as it began, but the grace period is now behind him. Domestically, the extension of medical coverage to the poor, the reform that would be his greatest work, has simultaneously met with opposition from a newly-mobilized Republican right, lobbying from private insurance companies and the Democratic left, frustrated that the president hasn’t even attempted to draw inspiration from health care systems in Europe.

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