Certitude devant l’énigme: Obama est un gauchiste

On sait qu’il est toujours intéressant de lire Gerard Baker, le chroniqueur du Times de Londres. D’un pro-américanisme extrême et peu incliné à la nuance, Baker résume bien la pensée générale de ces milieux britanniques absolument acquis à l’alliance transatlantique et aux “relations privilégiées”. Plus encore, Baker a de solides entrées chez les conservateurs interventionnistes US et reflète avec une fidélité vertueuse leur point de vue.

Dans sa chronique d’aujourd’hui, Baker s’attaque à l’énigme Obama, qu’il estime résolue, notamment par l’intermédiaire de Michelle Obama et de ses écarts de langage. Verdict sans appel: «Obama is dangerous.» La réflexion de Michelle Obama n’est pas passée inaperçue, malgré les tentatives de rattrapage: «In what might be the most revealing statement made by any political figure so far in this campaign season, Mrs Obama caused a stir this week. She said that the success of her husband Barack's campaign had marked the first time in her adult life that she had felt pride in her country.»

Pour Baker, aucun doute n’est possible. Michelle Obama a laissé parler le fond de son coeur et il est évident qu’elle exprime là ce qu’on pense dans la famille Obama. D'ailleurs, si l’on écoute bien les discours de Barack Obama, il apparaît avec certitude qu’il s’agit d’un démocrate gauchiste classique, un de ces Américains proche d’une gauche “à l’européenne”. (Intéressante, ou amusante image qu’emploie Bakert: cette gauche démocrate, dont Obama serait le représentant, “qui voudrait essentiellement et en toute honnêteté que leur pays ressemblât plus à la France”. Sarko a encore du travail pour convaincre les amis que la France est sur la bonne voie.)

«...She said this was the only time in her adult life that she had felt pride in America.

»It was instructive for two reasons. First, it reinforced the growing sense of unease that even some Obama supporters have felt about the increasingly messianic nature of the candidate's campaign. There's always been a Second Coming quality about Mr Obama's rhetoric. The claim that his electoral successes in places like Nebraska and Wisconsin might transcend all that America has achieved in its history can only add to that worry.

»Secondly, and more importantly, I suspect it reveals much about what the Obama family really thinks about the kind of nation that America is. Mrs Obama is surely not alone in thinking not very much about what America has been or done in the past quarter century or more. In fact, it is a trope of the left wing of the Democratic party that America has been a pretty wretched sort of place.

»There is a caste of left-wing Americans who wish essentially and in all honesty that their country was much more like France. They wish it had much higher levels of taxation and government intervention, that it had much higher levels of welfare, that it did not have such a “militaristic” approach to foreign policy. Above all, that its national goals were dictated, not by the dreadful halfwits who inhabit godforsaken places like Kansas and Mississippi, but by the counsels of the United Nations.

(...)

»This, I think, not his inexperience in public office, is the principal threat to Mr Obama's campaign. His increasingly desperate opponent, Hillary Clinton, keeps hammering away that his message is all talk and no substance - and she was joined this week by Mr Obama's likely Republican opponent in the November general election, John McCain.

»But if you listen to Mr Obama's speeches, it is not the lack of substance but the quality of it that ought to worry Americans. His victory speech after his latest primary win in Wisconsin this week was a case in point.

»There was no shortage of proposals. He plans large increases in government spending on health and education. He wants to tax the rich more to pay for it. He is against companies using the opportunities of free markets to restructure their operations in the US. He is vehemently protectionist. He continues to insist, despite the growing evidence that this left-wing nostrum would be lunacy, that the US must pull its troops out of Iraq with the utmost dispatch.

»While he speaks of the need for Americans to move beyond partisanship (“We are not blue states or red states, but the United States” is a campaign meme), when you cut through the verbiage there is nothing to suggest he believes anything that is seriously at odds with the far Left of his party. If you think about it for a second, it's not really an accident that he has been endorsed by the likes of Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson.»

Mis en ligne le 22 février 2008 à 09H21