The Obama Presidency and the New Roads for the American Way: Has the Past Been Left Behind?

Summary

The election of a black, biracial and bicultural president has not precedent both in the US and the so called developed world. This election has awakened high expectations everywhere both in the US and abroad. Apart from the arguable socio-ethnical features of Obama's election as President, the inheritance of President George W. Bush and the crisis in which the US is subsumed, make it even more critical for Obama to launch and accomplish a comprehensive plan towards the rescuing of US political and economic processes, including of course both its lost prestige abroad and the fracture of social consensus at the domestic level. The argument behind this paper is the low degree of legitimacy that there is in the US both at the domestic and international level. As a result there is an important social demand to change the nature of the policies that have prevailed during the Bush presidency. What this paper proposes is to discuss the extent in which the Obama presidency – given its peculiar new socio-political characteristics – will be able to respond to the great challenges that this new moment of the US modernisation process presents. On the one hand, it will have to reach a bipartisan solution and to obtain the necessary social consensus to satisfy the enormous discontent among important sectors of society as a result of the economic crisis and an unpopular war in Iraq.