The expectations held for Obama as he entered the White House in January 2009 thus became a major challenge for the president. He had raised hopes so high on matters such as repairing the breach between the United States and the broader Islamic world, or ending the nation s wars, or resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that disappointment was bound to occur as inherited problems and difficult leaders proved more intractable than expected. One might blame Obama s audiences for their na vet in thinking that he could quickly provide the antidote to many of the world s ills—after all, hadn t he warned that change would not come easily? Indeed, the decision of the Nobel Committee to award Obama the Nobel Peace Prize after less than a year of his presidency symbolized the degree to which a breathless hopefulness accompanied his inauguration, even in normally tight-buttoned countries abroad. But notwithstanding his occasional caveat, Obama himself had cultivated that sense of hope, change and historic transformation, not only on the campaign trail but in places like Prague in April and Cairo in June of 2009. So he bears some of the responsibility for the unrealistically inflated expectations, even if he might have always known better than to expect that an Obama presidency could change the world as rapidly as he led many others to believe.
At home, Obama has failed to fulfill his aspiration to be a post-partisan politician and to realize his prediction on the campaign trail that he could bridge the American political divide. Part of the reason, to be sure, has been Republican recalcitrance, but Obama has not been blameless. Most of this dynamic arose in regard to domestic policy. But his handling of several foreign policy issues also was afflicted by more partisanship than was necessary.
Iraq is a case in point. Obama was certainly on reasonable ground in having opposed the war in the first place, but his refusal to acknowledge the progress of the surge for so long created bitterness and some suspicions across the political aisle. This may come back to haunt him as critics (perhaps excessively) suggest that he was not really interested in finding a way to keep any U.S. forces in Iraq after 2011, thereby risking all the hard-fought gains of previous years. Again, Obama did give Iraqis twenty more months of military support than originally intended, did follow George Bush s schedule for withdrawing American forces, and in fact did offer to keep troops deployed longer if acceptable terms could be offered by Iraq s parliament. On top of that, it is possible that Iraqi politicians would have escalated their rivalries even with U.S. forces present; after all, they had taken almost a year to form a governing parliamentary coalition in 2010 due to standoffs between different parties and factions. Nonetheless, critics sensed that Obama was going back to his roots on the subject, revealing a certain disinterest in Iraq that he had simply masked for the first three years of his presidency, and his confused rhetoric on the subject fed into this interpretation. In addition, Obama talked about Guantanamo for so long that he hardened political divisions on the subject. Unable to persuade Congress or state and local officials to locate a new facility on American soil, he failed to honor his campaign pledge and his promise to the Muslim world that he could close down the detention facilities within a year of his inauguration. In effect, he has had to retain this aspect of Bush counterterrorism policy.
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