Outside the Aragon ballroom in the north Chicago neighbourhood of Uptown, little sign remained of the president’s 50th birthday party. The night before, 2,000 well-wishers had crammed inside the beautiful old building to mark Barack Obama’s half-century. They had partied and danced as R&B singer Jennifer Hudson crooned «Happy Birthday».
But now, only one forlorn birthday banner still hung from a local bar. The party was truly over. As unwelcome late birthday presents go, the dramatic downgrading of America’s debt rating by Standard & Poor’s was hard to beat. The shock news sent reverberations through US politics, triggered an ugly blame game and plunged the economy into a fresh crisis that looks set to reverberate all the way to next year’s presidential election.
On the streets of Uptown the mood was bleak. «The entire political culture has just stopped working. It feels like it is broken,» said local IT worker Christian Lindemer, 30, as he strolled by the now empty Aragon.
His critics might say the same of the Obama White House. It has certainly become a place under siege. On the right it faces implacable foes in the shape of an ultra-conservative Republican party that has danced nimbly around Obama’s efforts to work with it. Tea Party defenders shrug off the idea that its extremism helped to cause Standard & Poor’s action and put the blame for the downgrade firmly on Obama’s shoulders. «President Obama is destroying the foundations of our economy one beam at a time,» said Tea Party-backed presidential candidate Michele Bachmann as the news broke.
On the left, meanwhile, Obama faces a liberal base depressed by what it sees as the president’s continual concessions to Republicans. It blames the Tea Party’s intransigence over the debt ceiling for the political deadlock that led to the downgrade. Republicans were «antediluvian» wrote online Slate magazine columnist Jacob Weisberg. Even vice-president Joe Biden, in private meetings with Democrat leaders, has reportedly said they «acted like terrorists» .
But now Obama’s biggest enemy of all lies outside politics: it is the economy itself. The historic Standard & Poor’s downgrade came after a week of terrifying market swings and amid the promise of vicious cuts to America’s already shaky welfare state. It is now clear that the US economy is terribly sick. It is failing to create jobs and might double-dip back into recession. The stock market is tumbling. No wonder that Obama’s birthday celebrations were so brief. He flew in and out of Chicago on the same day. Yet perhaps he got a little lift from being in a town where sympathy for its favourite political son remains relatively strong. «He’s trying his best. Or at least I think he is,» said Lindemer.
But in the wider landscape of American politics there is no denying the anger among some leading lights of the left at Obama, which the debt downgrade will only sharpen. After all, last week’s debt deal – so hated by liberals – was meant to avoid precisely such a fiasco.
After having initially promised tax rises for the rich to go alongside deep spending cuts, Obama ended up signing a debt agreement with Republicans that contained no new revenues. Not a single cent would come from America’s wealthiest people while a burden of hundreds of billions of dollars of cuts would be borne by some of the poorest.
It was billed as tough but necessary medicine in order to raise the debt ceiling and stave off disaster. But, having swallowed the pill, America got downgraded anyway and the markets still fell. It seemed Obama had given away everything for nothing. For people such as documentary-maker and activist Robert Greenwald there were only a few apt words to describe Obama’s deal.
«I’m disgusted,» he said «I think the day it was signed was a sad day: economically, morally and politically.»
Yet the debt deal is now just one liberal complaint among many. Leftist Democrats decry the influence of the banking sector among Obama’s economic staffers. They bemoan the toothlessness of his financial reforms. His promise to shut Guantánamo Bay remains unfulfilled. He preserved huge tax breaks for the wealthy. He has upped the war in Afghanistan and not delivered on climate change and immigration reform.
Obama looks like a somewhat downgraded president. He has become the butt of late-night comedians on the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, where he is portrayed as naïve and weak.
Liberal commentators express their dismay as enthusiastically as they once praised him. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat said last week he was afraid «… we’re living through yet another failed presidency». Even some of Obama’s once staunchest supporters have pulled no punches. Princeton professor Cornell West, a leading black intellectual, recently described Obama as «… a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs». He did not shy away from that incendiary opinion last week, telling a black media conference in Philadelphia: «I’m an angry brother. Barack Obama is not angry … He’s a different kind of brother.»
There is huge envy among some progressives about the role of the Tea Party on the right. Even as they decry its aims they look longingly at its ability to influence politics. One progressive organisation, the Campaign for America’s Future, is organising a conference in Washington in October aimed at founding such a movement on the left. «We have to be an ideological force that is as energetic as the Tea Party and pushes the Democrats to be more bold,» co-director Roger Hickey told the Observer. Neither is CAF waiting until October to start action. This week , along with MoveOn.org, another liberal activist group, it will hold rallies outside scores of politicians’ offices.
But in some quarters, support for Obama remains strong. Bronzeville is a small neighbourhood on Chicago’s South Side. It has a rich history and in the earlier half of the last century was known as «the black metropolis». It was the epitome of black pride in Chicago, thriving with black-owned businesses, homes and a rich cultural life. Those days have gone, replaced with the tough times of the modern urban black American experience. But support for Obama is high here. «I believe he has done a magnificent job. People forget what was left after [George W] Bush. They forget the state he found the country in,» said plumber Terry Jones, 49. «I wish him a happy birthday and congratulate him on a job well done.»
The same is true in nearby Hyde Park, a wealthy liberal enclave where the Obamas have their family home. On these leafy streets, lined by mansions and expensively maintained lawns, many people believe Obama still epitomises what is right about American politics. They see him as the «adult in the room», standing above the fights between Democrats and Republicans. «He’s trying to do a good job. I like that he wants to negotiate with people on the other side,» said graduate student Anne Rebull, 29.
That sentiment chimes with Obama’s own aides’ ideas about how best to win the election of 2012. They believe that fight will take place in the centre ground of American politics and staking out that territory is worth the sacrifices around protecting social security and benefits for the elderly and the ill. It assumes the extremism of the Republican party will put off independents, while progressives will have no choice but Obama.
«Liberals are unhappy, but the Republicans will scare them into coming out for Obama,» said Larry Haas, a political commentator and former aide in the Clinton White House. Even Hickey admits there are no plans to run a liberal primary challenge to Obama: «Nobody is talking about a challenger. We are all terrified of an ultra-conservative Republican taking over government.»
But the downgrade is a rude wake-up call. When Obama took office he won much praise for staving off a second Depression by huge stimulus spending in the first months of his presidency. Standard & Poor’s has single-handedly made that look a little less impressive. Though the White House and Treasury have pushed back against the agency, pointing out a major maths error in its initial sums, the downgrade made clear what millions of Americans already understood: the state of the economy seems to be worsening again. The jobless rate is still above 9% and that headline fails to account for millions unemployed for so long they have stopped looking for work and dropped out of the official count.
Obama is set to embark on a bus tour of America’s heartland, where he will attempt to put jobs at the centre of his political message. But it might not be enough. Even on the streets of Bronzeville there was an understanding that economic times were now very hard, no matter how much one supported the current occupant of the White House. Jones admitted that the collapse of the housing market meant plumbing jobs were few and far between: «Nobody needs a plumber these days. It’s slow. I have had to cut back, tighten my belt.»
What is true for Jones is true for wider America. As the nation tightens its belt and faces more stock market falls, a second round of recession and massive spending cuts, the chances of an Obama second term also begin to narrow.
guardian.co.uk
Felipe 
The Met Police’s decision to flood the streets of London with 10,000 extra officers helped prevent a fourth night of rioting, a senior minister has said.
Chiara 
