Take -off on a lame duck

Santa Claus was amazingly generous with Barack Obama. The president met Christmas as a birthday: a triple victory in the congress, whether a joke! The influential columnist Charles Krauthammer immediately called her a triple crown - in horse -drawn sport, this is the highest award for a purebred English breed; To get it, you need to win all three main jumps in the season.

The president, who was sinking after the November defeat, immediately perked up. Its rating went upward and today reaches 46-48 percent. Interestingly, at the same time, only 23 percent of the Americans believe that the country is going on the right course. The laws that have compiled the Triple Crown of Obama are also skeptical. Only 24 percent consider its economic policy to be correct, and, consequently, the new anti -crisis law. Only 27 percent believe that Russia will comply with the terms of the new START-3 Treaty. And only the law on military service of gays and lesbians support more than half of voters.

In other words, the Americans highly appreciated the essence of the decisions made, but the political skill with which Obama and his team managed to hold them. Or, as one observer put it , “voters, who were crouched under the republican banner seven weeks ago, now they’ll scratch the turnips, perplexed:“ So who won in November? ”The other day I retold this reprise to one American who plays on Goboy and politics is usually not interested in politics, and she exclaimed for whom voted two years ago? vote in general.

Any defeat is a lesson for the future. Immediately after the elections in Washington, they spoke that the president was “close to the state of hopelessness”, that in essence he was elected not by merits, but by the will of chance, in the wake of a thirst for change. And they wondered if he should be elected for a second term. An obvious parallel was carried out with Bill Clinton, which in 1994 also received the Republican Congress. Then both chambers became opposition, now - only the lower, but in order to put sticks in the wheels, one is enough, especially since the democrats lost the qualified majority in the Senate.

However, the same experts who conducted the parallel saw the radical difference between the two leaders. “Clinton was completely brilliantly managed with the Republicans,” one of them recently said. “He instantly turned on a patch, changed his team and turned out to be a centrist. Obama is capable of this - in my opinion, a big question.”

Maybe Obama is not ready to give up his principles, but he definitely extracted the lesson from what happened. A single -party policy came to an end - he realized with the ultimate clarity. And he did everything to get the maximum possible from the "lame" session of the Congress, which usually does not have to wait for fateful decisions, because taking the old composition means not to respect the will of voters. But for Obama it was the last chance, and he used it in full.

In the American political vocabulary, this is called "build coalitions", and in Russian to chop the majority around specific bills. Legislators are a piece of goods, so the president personally convinced everyone to whom the decision depended. He entered the deal with the leader of the Republicans in the Senate Mitch MacConnell - agreed to extend the tax benefits introduced at Bush, if only the Republicans did not repose the obstacles to his new anti -crisis package. He managed to tear out the consent of the CTA from the Republicans only when he had an obligation to increase the appropriation for the modernization of nuclear forces and a missile defense and a half times. If in this case he needed to enlist the support of the "hawks", then around the law on gays in the army he built a coalition of liberals and moderate conservatives. This is a kind of unprincipled: the one who agreed to support one of the three laws could vote against the other two. But in the circumstances, this is the only possible way of action.

In fact, concessions largely depreciate the achievements. The law on the military service of homosexuals can be considered a pure "victory on points". However, upon closer examination, this victory is purely symbolic and not so indisputable.

Currently, in the US Armed Forces, the 1993 presidential directive is in force, called for the brevity of DADT - Donat Ask, Donmet Tell ("Do not ask, do not say"), which does not allow officers at draft points to be interested in the sexual orientation of the new recruitment. It was enough not to declare their features to serve as gays, lesbians and bisexuals. Theoretically, a transsexual could have entered military service under the same condition. But the leaders of LGBT sought exactly what to ask them, and they would proudly answer, in other words, to serve, it was allowed to be allowed to be open gays and lesbians.

The new law , very brief, prescribes the Minister of Defense to conduct a comprehensive study of the issue of how the abolition of the directive will affect the combat effectiveness and discipline of the troops. 60 days after the head of the Pentagon receives the result of this examination, he, the president and chairman of the United Committee of the chiefs of Shatabs, must confirm to Congress that the new policy will not reduce combat effectiveness. No deadlines for conducting a study have been established.

I personally have several questions. Are supporters of the abolition of the previous practice that all gays and lesbians want to admit this? Should heterosexuals demand that they be asked too? After all, it turns out that now hidden heterosexuals will serve in the Armed Forces. And finally. In the current congress of open gays and lesbians there are only three: Barney Frank in the Senate, Tammi Baldwin and Jared Polis - in the lower ward. This is well known about many, but they do not admit. Some were caught in male public toilets or on harassment to the states of Congress. Some of these caught were publicly against same -sex marriages, for a healthy American multi -hearted family. Should the congress now demand for himself the same that the new law requires the armed forces? Namely: so that when registering a candidate for Congress, the Federal Electoral Commission asked him if he was gay.

The LGBT community expects from Obama a much more radical step - the legalization of same -sex marriages (this issue is in the competence of the States, but the president’s position, of course, is important). However, Obama is not ready for this, he answers direct questions evasively . It is understandable: 48 percent of voters against such marriages and only 42 - for.

The coalition is good, but not to lose Obama your electorate for the next election. In the meantime, he exactly repeats Clinton's somersault ("unfolds on a patch", in English - "on the hryvnia"): Changes the team. The advisers who brought him to the defeat go - the Old Clinton Guard comes to their place in their place. In general, Bill Clinton, apparently, received in the White House the status of an uncle-Opekun with a short-lived nephew. Let's see if they will be able to enter the same river twice.