Stop thinking, start dreaming?

"How do you think the world would be different under Barack Obama?" was a question that Prannoy Roy recently posed while interviewing the formidable Henry Kissinger. In many ways it is a telling statement. As he spoke, Prannoy's face was radiant as that of a little child on a Christmas morning. The choice of words was also interesting: "the world under Barack Obama".

Prannoy's servility to Obama is symptomatic of what his media brethren have been doing across the world. For several months now, the media in most countries of the world have been drilling into the national psyche of their respective countries that Obama is some kind of messiah who is about to heal the world. Now avid reporting of an event so important as the US Presidential Election is understandable; but as the media began bleating for Obama, pleading with people as far as Agra to carry Obama-Biden stickers, the sense was more of nausea. The rest of the world does not vote in the Presidential election, neither should it; and hence it is important that the world media maintain a respectful distance from the process, refusing to take sides and dealing with the candidates strictly as they would deal with foreign leaders/heads of state.

Instead, the media from the rest of the world and the Indian media for the first time, barged into our living rooms, drumming into our people how important it was to "support" Obama. Now, what exactly does it mean for an Indian to "support" Obama? The US election is not a game of cricket (literally and figuratively!) that people can just choose to support a team. It is a democratic exercise meant exclusively for Americans. Instead, the media streamed in from various reaches of the American empire, pleading and begging for Obama. The independent foreign policy that was so zealously upheld through the last four years of nuclear diplomacy was undermined by the ready media campaign to sell to the Indian people the idea of being a US client state.

Barack Obama is perhaps the first politician who has been judged entirely by his campaign and not his actions. Now it is true that Obama represents a turnaround in the racial history of the US and his rise from a backwater to Harvard to the White House is a glowing tribute to the somewhat sullied notion of the American Dream. Yet, Obama is still a symbol, a man ushered in by the American people as an act of despair, a man who is as far removed from George Bush as could be. In the last two years, whiny Americans went from blaming everything, from the Shia Sunni conflict in Iraq to Hurricane Katrina on the policies of President Bush. What they failed to understand is that the US President does not act in isolation and there are events beyond his control. The Iraq war is a perfect example of American smugness; the American people were all for the war as long as it meant the US Marines pummelling an obviously much weaker nation to pieces. The war became unpopular only when fighting broke out in the alleys of Tikrit and Baghdad, killing Americans in large numbers. Instead of perceiving this as a challenge to their honour, most Americans advocated a speedy exit from the rough zone. It shows an allegiance not to the sense of purpose, neither to honour and diginity, but to convenience.

There has never been a perfect war. Things in the Iraq war went out of control for some time, and all that while, the worst inconvenience that Americans faced as their nation fought a war was high petrol prices! If Americans want to hold on to their numero uno status, they have to stop behaving like the fairy tale princess who felt the one pea through twenty mattresses and twenty feather beds.

It is particularly telling that the event that ultimately tipped the scales decisively in favour of Obama was the economic crash of October 2008. It just had to be Bush's fault. The fact that the endless, thoughtless spending by the American people, the tendency to buy everything... from houses to cars to clothes.... on easy credit rather than honest money has made middle class Americans as complicit in the crash as the executives on Wall Street, was wilfully ignored. Naturally, no candidate had the courage to tell the voting public that they had only themselves to blame for their miseries. For most of the population that was not otherwise obsessed with religion and the Bible, it was much easier to eject the Republicans and dope themselves with a dose of Obama. When you have whittled away your own riches and indeed those of your fathers owing to your whims, self deception is always the answer; just as the gambler who has just ruined himself will often take to drink.

In truth, Obama is still unknown and unproven, more like the new credit card everyone is excited about. "Live now, pay later" was a life philosophy that got Americans into a mess in which they lost their homes, their jobs and possibly their crown as the No.1 nation in the world. "Vote now, think later" is a policy that they might live to regret. As serious, professedly prestigious critical publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the International Herald Tribune debate among themselves which of the world's problems Obama will solve first, one can only beg the American public for a wee bit of sanity.

There are many wonderful things about Obama; he is as brilliant as can be, a powerful speaker and a plucky man who began as the less fancied candidate and then trumped the Clinton machine. His world view is also more inclusive than that of President Bush and his election can be taken as a net gain for racial equality across the world. If it were a perfect world, everyone should have voted for him.

But there are savages, in the Middle East and elsewhere, who see Obama's more civilized approach as an exploitable opportunity. It is up to Americans to make sure that their new President remembers that he is a partisan, a representative of America and its interests, rather than a man whose coming fulfils a prophecy. If Obama assumes office believing that he will be on the cover of every history textbook ever written, chances are he will leave the world worse than it is.

(The Oracle expects to come back to Obama, this time discussing more specifically, his position on India and Kashmir.)