It’s quite amazing how quickly the local self-righteous pricks just shut the hell up in the wake of Tuesday’s election.  I suppose that, if you consider yourself to be tolerant, wise, and ethical by virtue of the fact that you’re Not American, it comes as quite a shock when the Americans elect a vociferously lefty black man to their highest office while your own country can’t manage to break its habit of electing old white male lawyers from Ontario and Quebec*.  But while I’m gleeful at their discomfort, I’m even more sincerely happy that not only can an African-American get elected President, but no-one’s seriously suggesting that his race had anything to do with it.  Barack Obama is a superb politician: he’s an excellent orator, and a new face at just the moment when “more of the same” would be intolerable.

Unfortunately, being a superb politician can get you elected, but by itself it’s unlikely to make you effective once you’re in office.  And while Obama might well turn out to be the best President since — oh, hell, Eisenhower — I don’t think it’s possible for a President to fulfil all the expectations that Obama’s supporters have of him.  People have such great expectations of Obama largely because they identify all of the country’s real and perceived ills with Bush 43.  I’m not trying to exculpate Curious George, here, but we need to remember that he couldn’t have done what he did without the consent of the House of Representatives and of the Senate.

For the past two years, the Senate has been split down the middle and the House has been solidly Democratic.  Nonetheless, they cheerfully passed budget after budget authorizing more and more funds for the war in Iraq (opposition to which, you might recall, the Democrats rode into a House majority in 2006) and a FISA reform package even more sweeping than Bush dared to ask for.  And, well, then there’s the bailout.

Even if Obama does walk across the Reflecting Pool on Inauguration Day, he’ll still have to deal with a Legislative branch that’s aided and abetted Dubya’s policies, and which probably won’t take kindly to that being pointed out.  So far the Dems have been able to hide behind the fig leaf of a Presidential veto, blaming Bush every time they’re “forced to” support his policies, but that’s about to go away.  The only thing they’ll be able to fall back upon is the threat of a Republican filibuster in the Senate — and if they do that, someone might start asking uncomfortable questions about why they didn’t pull the same shit when they were the minority party**.

Nonetheless, I suppose it’s always possible that Reid and Pelosi will meekly fall into line behind Obama.  What then?  Since people identify Dubya as the villain that fucked things up (and they’re largely, if not completely, right), they’re identifying Obama as the hero who’s supposed to unfuck things.  (I blame Teddy Roosevelt for this nonsensical notion that the President is some sort of superhero who’s both able and expected to solve all of the nation’s ills.)  That’s, um, unlikely to happen.

To begin with, consider the credit crisis.  I’ve argued already that the housing bubble has its roots in events as far back as the Great Depression, and I’m certain that I’ve only barely scratched the surface.  It’s not a Gordian Knot that one can just hack to pieces with a sword.  It’s simply not the sort of problem that can quickly and painlessly be brought under control… but that’s what people expect of Obama.

Obama’s health-care plan will also be difficult to manage, but again it’s one of his greatest expectations.  Smaller, putatively more manageable publicly-funded health plans in Massachussets and Hawaii are in deep shit, and with the economy the way it is things are likely to get worse before they get better.  (Up here in the Great Canadian Worker’s Paradise, we can’t afford to use new syringes for each patient, and emergency rooms are turning into parking lots — or graveyards, if you prefer.  Anyone who claims that our system is a shining beacon of Hope and Change is full of shit.)

And even though the whole world’s been celebrating Obama’s election, he’s going to have some trouble delivering on his foreign policy promises.  Consider:

• Obama’s Challenge (Stratfor.com)

Like any politician, Obama will face the challenge of having made a set of promises that are not mutually supportive. Much of his challenge boils down to problems that he needs to solve and that he wants European help on, but the Europeans are not prepared to provide the type and amount of help he needs. This, plus the fact that a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq requires an agreement with Iran — something hard to imagine without a continued U.S. presence in Iraq — gives Obama a difficult road to move on.

[...]

Obama must deal with extraordinarily difficult foreign policy issues in the context of an alliance failing not because of rough behavior among friends but because the allies’ interests have diverged. He must deal with this in the context of foreign policy positions difficult to sustain and reconcile, all against the backdrop of almost half an electorate that voted against him versus supporters who have enormous hopes vested in him.

(It’s an excellent article all the way through.  You really ought to go read it.  I’ll wait.)

Fulfilling any one of his major promises — or for that matter, any one of the major achievements people expect of him regardless of what he’s said he’ll do — would require a Herculean effort, but it would probably be achievable.  Obama’s biggest problem will be that he’s expected to do it all, but many of his expectations are contradictory.  And this is all supposing the best-case scenario***: that he’ll be able to do it with the full support of Congressional and Senatorial Democrats.

For all that, I think Obama’s going to be a better President than McCain would have been.  He’ll push through some odiously bad policy.  He’ll push through some passably good policy.  He’ll make some problems better while making others worse.  As we’ve done for the past two hundred-odd years, his country will get on with things despite the best efforts of the federal government.

With that said, I am looking forward with great glee to the Republicans’ reactions when they realize what Obama might do with the excess of power they gave the Executive office during Dubya’s reign.

——

* No, I haven’t forgotten Kim Campbell; note however that she won a leadership contest in the Progressive Conservative party (there’s a name to explode heads these days) rather than an actual federal election.

** Of course, they did.  (Occasionally.)  But Democratic filibusters couldn’t — or didn’t — stop the most egregious of Republican legislation, so I hope people take very unkindly to the notion that the mere threat of a Republican filibuster ought to stop the Senate from fixing their past mistakes.

*** For him, at least