Arthur Chevallier – Obama: the charm still operates

Barack Obama did not stun the world because he was black, or even because he was virtuous, but because, on the evening of his victory, he spoke with an evident, loose, sure intelligence. ‘herself. Handsome, elegant, chic as he was !, especially for an American; but it is very rare to be charming while being foolish. He made mistakes, was sometimes unpleasant, snubbed France with incredible aplomb. The French forgave him everything, and we understand them; this man was not a man, but a permanent triumph. The strength and power attached to his office, ordinarily unbearable on the part of American presidents, was channeled through the sophistication and refinement of his temperament. No matter how much we think, compare, analyze: post-war American democracy, perhaps even liberal democracy, has offered nothing better. The literature cannot say the same.

Barack Obama has never been so stiff as in his Memoirs, A promised land **. It just goes to show that governing by and in the name of intelligence is not enough to become a writer. Nobody expected to discover Marcel Proust, but finally, General de Gaulle and Winston Churchill had demonstrated that one could dominate literature after having dominated history. The former president is a priori sincere, thoughtful, cultivated, meticulous, too sometimes. He admits his mistakes, admits to having been presumptuous. Not just in the Oval Office; from the start, when, elected to the Illinois Senate, in 2000 he believed he could win a Democratic primary for a congressional candidacy, which he lost miserably. He evokes his youth with humor (one of the rare times he shows it), explains how, during his studies, he pretended to have read books to seduce girls. It is also an opportunity to understand the strange articulation, evident to everyone when it was in business, of introspection and action. It is rare to see a head of state devote so much energy to limiting his own power. It was as if Barack Obama had tried to replace a desire for war in the United States with a desire for peace. America, through the voice of its president, was no longer showing its strength by intervening wherever and whenever it wanted, but by declaring everywhere and when it wanted that peace was superior to war. This was the meaning of the speech given in Hiroshima in May 2016, in which Obama denounced not only the use of nuclear weapons by his own country, but also the victims of World War II and, beyond, the victims of all wars.

Pettiness

In the excellent documentary dedicated to the end of his presidency, The Final Year***, available on Netflix, he and his teams explain wanting to devote their last six months to foreign policy. Why ? Demonstrate that what may have appeared as reluctance was the result of an intellectual revolution in American diplomacy. From Libya to Syria, via the Ukrainian crisis, at the end of which Vladimir Putin had succeeded in “annexing” a territory which did not belong to Russia, Obama made decisions that were not only questionable from a point of view. strategic view, but still incomprehensible in view of the American foreign policy of the last thirty years. Where the world saw errors, it saw a concept, a theory, a project. Here is a symbol and a summary of his method of government: priority to intelligence; as for politics, it is in itself a concession, must never be more. This does not mean that Obama was more virtuous than another. He believed in ideas, reasoning and demonstrations. He dreamed of an America whose imperialism would have been intellectual and not warlike, and too bad if he was, probably, the only American capable of it. With such dispositions of mind, why did he love Europe so little, and particularly France? No doubt because his arrogance prevented him from recognizing any model other than himself. In the game of panache, spirit and culture, France is rarely beaten. These Memoirs are also revealing of a wickedness whose exaggeration reveals the nature.

The inelegant, if not racist, description of Nicolas Sarkozy, relayed by the press as early as last week, says less Obama’s hatred for the French president than for France. How happy he is to utter petty adjectives at the place of the representative of a country whose nature, function and reputation are attached to art and intelligence, that is to say things of which he never ceases to speak with desire. As a man convinced of “American exceptionalism”, these are his words, a man whose ambition and desire for seduction were commensurate with the pretension of the United States in general, a man who dreamed of proving to the Old Continent that America could challenge him the place of champion of civilization, he could not be anything other than morgous towards France and Germany. If he is laudatory towards Merkel, he allows himself a remark of doubtful taste by referring to Nazism: “She [Angela Merkel] was known for his mistrust of […] hyperbolic words, and her team would later admit that they were initially skeptical of me, precisely because of my oratory skills. I did not take offense, considering that a German leader had every reason to have a slight distrust of the tribunes. ” Take this. He was losing an opportunity to be silent. Little did he know America would give itself to a stupid clown who, in less than four years, would put out the last fires of progressivism.