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Honeymoon is Over - CLARENCE PAGE (‘CHICAGO TRIBUNE' COLUMNIST) - 27th September 2009

Not only is Barack Obama's presidential honeymoon period almost certainly over, he's just been through arguably the craziest, politically action-packed week in his hectic first eight months in the most powerful job on Earth. You name it, in a nonstop series of talkfests and speeches, the first African-American incumbent in the White House has touched on almost every local and global crisis around - and, right now, there are certainly plenty of those! To get a handle on Barack Obama's big week that was at the UN in New York, the G20 in Pittsburgh, and various other dialogues, meetings and fora, we caught up with inveterate Obama-watcher, Clarence Page, the 'Chicago Tribune's man in Washington.

GEORGE NEGUS: Clarence, it's really good to talk to you again. Somebody described this week - the one that is still actually going on as we talk - as "that was week that was", in both international and US terms. How would you describe it - you are much closer to the action? It's seems like it's frenetic in both New York and Washington at the moment.

CLARENCE PAGE, 'CHICAGO TRIBUNE' COLUMNIST: Well, it's gotten to be the way things are in Washington now, with this administration, because they tried to do so much, at the same time, dealing with two wars overseas, a big debate over health care in the US. of course, the international economic meltdown, and reshaping our foreign policy. It's been a pretty full life here, this week.

GEORGE NEGUS: I found a strange headline which said this, which you might like to react to. "Right now, Barack Obama is trying to stop climate change, "forge Middle-East peace, "fix Africa, end poverty, chair the UN, "abolish nuclear weapons, "pull Russia, India, China and Iran into line." I mean, I find myself saying, well, other than having breakfast with Bill Clinton, and cosying up to Kevin Rudd, our bloke, what does he do for fun?

CLARENCE PAGE: And, on the second day he created the planets and the oceans, etc! There is not a lot of time left for fun. GEORGE NEGUS: Is he trying - is he biting off more than he can chew, I guess? We have all used the old phrase about is there more style than substance to Barack Obama, but is he trying to get his finger in too many pies at the moment? CLARENCE PAGE: Well, I think - well, that question is asked a lot here, in fact. Is the biting off too much? But, the fact is, there is a lot to bite off. Before he became President, of course, this campaign was shaped by all of these big issues going on, foreign and domestic. At the same time, though, he didn't have to go after health care right now, even though he had promised it, but he is, knowing that in the first year of an American President's presidency is the best one for getting things done. This is really his best shot for going after these big issues.

GEORGE NEGUS: Yep, I noticed that you actually said yourself that you have described health - the whole health reform issue, which has been boggling him - as possibly his Iraq. What did you mean by that? Are you saying he is distracted from other issues because of the health thing, the way George Bush was distracted by Iraq?

CLARENCE PAGE: Well, Iraq was something that George Bush thought was really important and then, once he got into it, became a quagmire. He couldn't get out of it, didn't know which way to go, and ran into unexpected problems. The main reason why I brought that up was because, you remember, right after the fall of Baghdad, there was chaos, and everybody said, "Well, gee, didn't Donald Rumsfeld or President Bush or Dick Cheney think about any kind of a follow-up as what they are going to do once they had Iraq?" And that's what has happened with the health care debate. There was all this talk early on that they were going to have a bill, some legislation to present before the August recess. They didn't. And, August was a time where the members of Congress went home and they had these raucous town hall meetings in many districts, and you had a lot of ugly and negative backlash headlines and pictures that set back the Obama momentum, you could say. This has divided his own constituency of Democrats, liberals, who want to have won some kind of government-sponsored choice that's opposed to just the private industry. And, so, that's the worst thing a politician can do is to divide his or her own base, and that's kind of what's happened.

GEORGE NEGUS: Certainly, not necessarily overriding it but, running along beside it, the race issue has raised its ugly head again. I noticed that Maureen Dowd, a columnist, said, "Some people just can't believe that a black man is President "and will never accept it." Is race still the sleeper issue? Is Barack Obama, being an Afro-American, still in a lot of Americans' minds, and that's going to dog him for his entire presidency?

CLARENCE PAGE: After I read my good friend Maureen's column there my reaction was, "Welcome to my world!" If you're African-American, you expect race to be a part of people's considerations. It is just the realities here. I think, if anything, there will certainly - there is a big debate, really - a national argument going on right now as to just how much race has to do with the opposition Barack Obama is facing. Quite honestly, I expected him to have opposition - every President has opposition. You don't have to be a racist to be opposed to Barack Obama's policies. You can just be a Conservative, who thinks he is just too liberal. At the same time, the way some of this opposition is expressed - I mean, what do you do if you really want to dig at somebody? You tell them they've got a funny nose, or they're too short or something. In this case, some of the signs being carried by protesters have a decidedly racist or racial tinge to them. Some of them have outright swastikas, and this sort of thing. But, I think that's really more a tactic to try to shock and get attention. The polling shows that the same 10% or 15% of racists, if you will, just won't accept a black President. That really hasn't changed much.

GEORGE NEGUS: I enjoyed his line on late night television when he said that he was actually black before he became President.

CLARENCE PAGE: Well, that's quite right, and David Letterman said, "How long have you been black?" Go back to the campaign, you know, when he first declared, we, in the media, were asking was Barack Obama black enough to rally black voters! That seems like a century ago now.

GEORGE NEGUS: It does.

CLARENCE PAGE: And, then, before we knew it, he was too black, and it's going to be there. He made history as our black President, or bi-racial President - some people still argue that, in fact!

GEORGE NEGUS: This week's been really quite crucial, almost pivotal, for him, though, because he is going from that very, very popular, almost articulate rock star politician that became President, to now facing the Realpolitik of the world. Some people are saying, the way that he has been behaving this week, rightly or wrongly, for better or worse, you would think he was running for president of the world. I mean, is he making that transition going from a popular man of hope, as it were, to a respected, listened-to leader that people are going to take notice of with things like climate change and the global financial crisis, let alone the conflict, etc, etc. It's a hell of an agenda. Is he going to make that transition? Has this week been important?

CLARENCE PAGE: Well, he is making that transition. Number one, we have a politician, a former New York governor, Mario Cuomo, who said, "We campaign in poetry. We govern in prose." And that's Barack Obama's story. He has gotten some good verbal support on the world stage from the President of Russia, from Muammar Gaddafi, for whatever that's worth. But, you know, now we see just how well those folks are going to come across and will he really get anything back for the very conciliatory outreach that he has made, compared to President Bush.

GEORGE NEGUS: Clarence, he lectured Wall Street in no uncertain terms a couple of weeks back about corporate greed, etc, and pulling their heads in and doing the right thing. Is he going to find it much harder to lecture the world about how to straighten up the mess that they'd like to think America has caused?

CLARENCE PAGE: Well, I don't know if we expect a lot from G20. Really, people talk about it a lot but, these meetings, these big summits, are really designed for, in many ways, the big handshake scenes, the big group scenes. What's been interesting when Barack Obama has gone abroad for this kind of a conference is what kind of body language do you see between him and other world leaders and, so far, we really haven't seen that change a lot. Again, he is pushing for policies that are decidedly different from those of President Bush. He is pushing for a type of an outreach that is different and, so far, he seems to have that goodwill still being expressed. China is sounding more conciliatory and cooperative on climate policy. Russia is sounding more positive in so far as dealing with Iran, but we have go to see some action behind the talk.

GEORGE NEGUS: Yep. Is Afghanistan going to be the thorn in his side, if you like? I mean, there is confusion, to say the least, in the Obama camp about what the heck to do about Afghanistan.

CLARENCE PAGE: Well, the real confusion is when is our endgame? That was the sort of thing that was a problem for Bush in Iraq or for Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam. What is the endgame? How do we know we have won? How do we begin to know to pull out and when? So, right now, President Obama is being pressured by our own military leaders to give them a more troops, because to implement the kind of policy - the kind of strategy that we have there right now - we need more troops. But, if he is also getting pressure from his own base, and people asking questions like, "Why are we there to go after al-Qaeda and Bin Laden? They are probably over in Pakistan." Then the other side says, "The reason why they're in Pakistan is because we're in Afghanistan! If we pull out, al-Qaeda will just move back in and the Taliban are going to have even more victories." So, that's question - what is ourstrategy? In the meantime, President Obama is really on that fence. We don't know which way he's going to go. He does have a little time. We don't have the troops right now, for that matter, to reinforce positions.

GEORGE NEGUS: He has, in fact, actually said, earlier in the year he did say that he didn't think that the war against the Taliban, such as it is, is being won. He said, "No, we are not winning that war." I mean, that's hardly encouraging for the rest of us who are sending troops almost at America's behest. I mean, how can we be enthusiastic about our involvement in Afghanistan if the US is totally uncertain of whether they should be there?

CLARENCE PAGE: That's part of the problem, too. Our allies are getting impatient, and who can blame you all? You want to know why you're there as well, because people are making sacrifices and you want to know that this is going to be worth something.

GEORGE NEGUS: Clarence, nice to talk to you. Always is.

CLARENCE PAGE: Thank you for having me.