O resultado da eleição americana na visão do porta voz do católicismo liberal britanico.
Barack Obama's remarkable election as the first black president of the United States is a truly historic development, and its repercussions will be felt around the world. How did it happen? And can he deliver the change he has promised?
There are striking parallels to the life of Barack Obama in the Oscar-winning 1967 film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, in which Sidney Poitier played a doctor who wants to marry the white daughter of a liberal San Francisco couple (Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, in his final role). The couple even met in Hawaii - as Obama's parents did in real life. Tensions ensue, but love and enlightenment prevail, and Poitier's wife-to-be is sure their children will "grow up to be president of the United States and they'll all have colourful administrations".
Well, it took a long time and a lot of suffering, but life has finally imitated art. Rather than a transformational leader, Barack Obama is, as Richard Cohen wrote in The Washington Post, "a confirmational [his emphasis] figure, and this election confirms what has been gradually occurring in American society" ever since the civil-rights era of the 1960s. Those years began the tumultuous conversion to racial justice that had been delayed for a century after the North won the Civil War. But in a way Obama's victory, like the Poitier film, shows that the culture has been ahead of the policies, even if neither has caught up to the ideal.
Obama's victory, which seemed as inevitable in recent weeks as it was improbable earlier this year, came after voters who had twice backed George W. Bush, the champion of conservative white Christians, switched to a black man of mixed parentage whose opponents used his foreign-sounding name to recall both the vanquished Iraqi dictator as well as the architect of the 9/11 attacks.
The nation seemed ready for a tectonic shift. While African Americans are still burdened by the legacy of racism and segregation, bearing an undue portion of America's economic and social ills, blacks are also part of the social fabric in ways they have never been before. Indeed, a thriving black middle class has emerged in the United States over the past generation, exemplified in many ways by Obama's own life: the child of a white Protestant mother from Kansas and a Kenyan father who was born Muslim, Obama was raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. His father left when he was a small child, and his mother remarried, but he was nurtured by his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who died on Sunday, two days before the vote that would elect her grandson. Obama had already repaid her faith in him, earning a degree from Harvard Law School, teaching at the University of Chicago, and entering politics and in 2004 winning election as the junior senator from Illinois. Obama is the American Dream, and in that sense is more familiar than he is foreign.
Obama's election is another important step towards what the Founding Fathers - all white men, many of them slaveowners - called "a more perfect union". As Obama said in his speech on election day, "This victory alone is not the change we seek; it is only the chance for us to make that change."
And that is where the path once again grows steep. Now the prophetic rhetoric gives way to the cold reality of a country that cannot afford a New Deal or a Great Society. But the challenges facing America are, historians say, every bit as grave as those that faced Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression, and the desire for fundamental change - Obama's campaign mantra - as strong as that which coursed through America in the 1960s.
Voters want the unprecedented budget deficit reined in and tax cuts for middle-class families and the working poor. They want better health care and they want it guaranteed, and the nation needs to repair its infrastructure at home and its image abroad. The nation is involved in two wars, and the military needs to be rebuilt, not reduced. Obama does not face a "peace dividend" as Bill Clinton did, and there is no foreseeable housing bubble to keep him afloat like George W. Bush. And while Democrats control Congress, House and Senate leaders will give the new president their own shopping list, not a rubber stamp.
Moreover, despite Obama's victory, the nation remains divided on moral and religious issues. Debates on abortion, gay marriage and euthanasia polarised the electorate and drew the Catholic bishops into the political fray. But the fierce denunciations of Obama and the Democrats by some bishops and the balanced tones of most others also exposed divisions within the hierarchy (the US bishops are in fact meeting later this month to try to mend their own rifts). That left Catholic voters - nearly a quarter of the electorate, and the critical swing vote - free to make up their own minds, and they voted for Obama by a 54 per cent margin. "For Catholics, as for other Americans, the economy became the dominant issue in the election. Few said that abortion was the most important issue," according to Fr Thomas Reese, a Jesuit and political scientist.
But Obama says he wants to heal these divides, not exploit them, by finding a way to move forward on issues like abortion. Many Catholic leaders say no such common ground exists, and Evangelical Christians are unlikely to cut Obama slack either; they went for McCain almost as strongly as they did for Bush, despite Obama's efforts to demonstrate how his own deep Christian faith informs his more liberal policies. Without some sort of truce, the rise of a "religious Left" to counter the formidable "religious Right" could spell yet another round of so-called "culture wars".
The expectations are as high as the needs are great, and Obama knows that, unfair as it is, the success of the American experiment will depend on his own success in the hard work of governing. Few will care that he is black, but everyone will care if he falters.
Yes, in the coming weeks, many will grumble that Obama was lucky to win. But take a look at the challenges he faces. Some luck.
Fonte: David Gibson, The Tablet
