On November 6, Barack Hussein Obama shuffled to victory in an
election that was never that interesting, never that close and,
honestly, never that important. It is a dismal time to be the United
States and President Obama is not likely to invigorate the country the
morning after. But if America is a brand in decline, Pakistan is a brand
in flux.
A billion dollars later, as the Carey Brothers put it, Mitt Romney is
now a trivia question. Is there closure? No, because the Romney brand
is only distinguished by its lack of distinction. Measured against
fellow also-rans, Romney had neither the personality of John McCain nor
the principles of George McGovern. By flipping back to the deranged Tea
Party fringe, then flopping forward to the centre around debate time,
he couldn’t even muster Barry Goldwater’s fundamentalist vibe. Even in
loss, his campaign provides us no lesson.
At no point was the election in a dead heat: the challenger trailed
in all eight battleground states for the better part of the spring. The
other running theme wherein the two candidates presented ‘a clear
choice’ only held true at home. Romney’s social conservatism belonged to
1953 and his plans to run the economy like a chief executive were at
clear odds with President Obama’s dime store populism kicking around
millionaires and billionaires at every stump speech. The entire election
smelt of mediocrity. If one remembers how the presidents Bush clawed
their way into the White House — with George HW implying his opponent
freed rapists from jail and George W’s polling team ringing up undecided
voters to inform them his GOP rival had fathered a black child — Obama vs Romney
seems far from political history’s most negative electoral campaign. It
was certainly the most expensive but such records are made to be broken
by the next round — which brings us to why either outcome was awful for
Pakistan.
It was uniquely upsetting to see us, among 21 happier countries polled by the
BBC, be the lone voice in support of Romney.
This meant that our depth of disillusionment has grown far and wide and
completely out of step with other countries. But the onus, for once,
isn’t on us. Four years ago, a mixed-race child born to a single mother
struggled to find both purpose and identity. “Caught without a class, a
tradition or a structure,” he wrote in college about “having large
dollops of envy” for Pakistani friends gravitating towards the business
world. Even when nominated to be president of the US, he refused to make
his ethnicity into a campaign jingle. In 2008, inspiration was bursting
at the seams of the Barack Obama message and people could feel it.
Four years later, ‘national interest’ trumped the meaning of life or
familiarity with Pakistani college-going types. The former
constitutional law professor handpicks a kill list (apparently, every
Tuesday) and deemed offenders are picked off by drone missiles.
Complaining that drone strikes drove American policy in Pakistan, the
recently-departed US ambassador, Cameron Munter, even whined that he
“didn’t realise his main job was to kill people”. After 176 dead
children, it’s good to see the ambassador having learnt something from
his 25 years of high diplomacy.
Osama bin Laden’s death is heralded as the presidency’s key
achievement. Meanwhile, a foreign contractor shot dead two citizens in
Lahore and a third was run over by his convoy. Gunships roamed a mile into Pakistani territory and killed 24 of our soldiers.
We closed Nato’s supply routes to Afghanistan before reopening them
like confused teenagers. Just now, calls to hunt down anti-Pakistan
militants over the border in Afghanistan have been rebuffed. Really?
After all that Haqqani rhetoric?
And so, Pakistan has begun looking to make once-sacrilegious friends,
to disappearing Russians, cagey Indians, even most hopefully,
Bangladesh. The road to reassessment is hard but no one cares for the
alternative. Morning has come in President Obama’s America, one far more
miserable than the one Ronald Reagan declared 18 years ago. And we need
to look away the same way he did.