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8 anni di Obama

Res publica   03.10.16  

Barack Obama nel 2008 e nel 2016

8 anni di presidenza Obama ripercorsa passo passo dal New York Magazine.

All presidencies are historic. But no president since at least LBJ, and probably FDR, has arrived in Washington at a moment of greater historic urgency than Barack Obama. The man who took that oath of office seemed cut from American folklore — a neophyte politician elected senator only four years before, a prodigious and preacherly orator from the "Land of Lincoln" and the South Side of Chicago of the Great Migration. An embodiment not just of the American Dream as it had been imagined by the Greatest Generation of his own maternal grandparents but of a new version, too, one that might be embraced by his daughters — global, utopian-ish, post-boomer, "post-racial."

More than "hope," Obama's candidacy promised "one America." It is the deep irony of his presidency, and for Obama himself probably the tragedy, that the past eight years saw the country fiercely divided against itself. The president still managed to get a ridiculous amount done, advancing an unusually progressive agenda. But however Americans end up remembering the Obama years decades from now, one thing we can say for sure is that it did not feel, at the time, like an unmitigated liberal triumph. It felt like a cold civil war.

Or a never-breaking political fever. There was the tea-party rage and Occupy Wall Street. Every other week, it seemed, a new shooting. Each movement was met by a countermovement, and yet, somehow, both the left and the right were invigorated, watched over by a president marked so deeply by temperamental centrism even his supporters called him Spock. Whether you noticed or not, our culture was shaken to its core. There was a whole new civil-rights era, both for those whose skin color and for those whose love was long met by prejudice. The first iPhone was released during the 2008 campaign. We got our news from Facebook, debated consent, and took down Bill Cosby. Elon Musk built a spaceship to Mars.

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La dottrina Obama

Res publica   10.03.16  

Un bilancio della presidenza Obama in politica estera nell'intervista rilasciata all'Atlantic dal 44esimo presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America.

Obama understands that the decision he made to step back from air strikes, and to allow the violation of a red line he himself had drawn to go unpunished, will be interrogated mercilessly by historians. But today that decision is a source of deep satisfaction for him.

"I'm very proud of this moment," he told me. "The overwhelming weight of conventional wisdom and the machinery of our national-security apparatus had gone fairly far. The perception was that my credibility was at stake, that America's credibility was at stake. And so for me to press the pause button at that moment, I knew, would cost me politically. And the fact that I was able to pull back from the immediate pressures and think through in my own mind what was in America’s interest, not only with respect to Syria but also with respect to our democracy, was as tough a decision as I've made—and I believe ultimately it was the right decision to make."

This was the moment the president believes he finally broke with what he calls, derisively, the "Washington playbook."

"Where am I controversial? When it comes to the use of military power," he said. "That is the source of the controversy. There's a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses. Where America is directly threatened, the playbook works. But the playbook can also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions. In the midst of an international challenge like Syria, you get judged harshly if you don't follow the playbook, even if there are good reasons why it does not apply."

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Juncker, Tusk, Obama e Hollande sugli attentati a Parigi

Res publica   14.11.15  

I am deeply shocked by the events in Paris. We stand in full solidarity with the people of France.

Su Twitter il commento del presidente della Commissione Europea Jean-Claude Juncker e quello di Donald Tusk, presidente del Consiglio Europeo.

I follow with shock the attacks in Paris. My full solidarity & sympathy with the French people and authorities.

Il messaggio chiarissimo e durissimo del presidente del mondo libero. I parigini non resteranno soli.

Il presidente Hollande dichiara lo stato d'emergenza per la prima volta dalla guerra d'Algeria.

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