The first anniversary of his resounding victory in last year’s Presidential election has been more blues than roses for Barack Obama. In widely watched gubernatorial elections last Tuesday in New Jersey and Virginia, the Democratic Party came up short. The Democrats lost New Jersey after 12 years, while in Virginia the President’s Party could not consolidate last year’s victory for the first time in a presidential election in forty years. They did win other minor State and local elections, and the few off-year elections are of no direct legislative consequence in Washington. But the pin-prick defeats have made a chink in the Obama aura and are worrisome to the Democrats as they look ahead to next year’s Congressional elections. The Republican victories may not mean much for the rejuvenation of the Party in the short term, but are a huge fillip to the far rightwing that is doing everything possible to distract America from Obama’s agenda.

What is Obama’s agenda? The answer lies in the eyes of the beholders. For his rightwing detractors, Obama is the bridgehead of socialism, nothing less. The Obama detractors are the scumbags of American politics who have taken advantage of the disarray in the Republican Party leadership and stepped in to dominate the opposition to Obama. They have taken control of the American airwaves at several locations and are propagating all manner of lies and libels to discredit everything that the Obama Administration is doing. The undertone of racism in their attacks is all too audible. And racist remarks can now be dressed up as expressions of honesty against the hypocrisy of political correctness.

Moderate Republicans have been worried that the takeover of the Party by rightwing extremists would further alienate moderate Americans and independent voters. Republican defeats in these elections would have been enough to put them on a shorter leash. On the contrary, the two gubernatorial victories have given them unlimited bragging rights.

Equally, the Republican victories will force Obama and his Administration to be on the defensive and further disenchant his youthful and multihued supporters. It was their energy and enthusiasm that enabled Obama to not only defeat the beleaguered Republican candidate John McCain but earlier secure the Democratic nomination from the very formidable Hillary Clinton. These supporters notably stayed home in the New Jersey and Virginia elections, while the independent voters who supported Obama last year went over to the other side in both states. Reassuringly for the Democrats, however, the same voters have indicated in the exit polls that they are still supportive of the Obama presidency.

Within the Democratic ranks, the meaning of the Obama agenda is now more tentative, if not confusing, and has ceased to be galvanizing as it used to be earlier. "Yes, we can" has now been downsized to "what we can." It is no longer the politics of presiding over change, but the Churchillian take that "politics is the art of the possible." Essaying in the Harper’s magazine, Kevin Baker, the novelist, elevates Obama as being the first American president in 40 years (after Lyndon Johnson?) "to convey any gravitas", but bemoans in the same breath that although Obama’s failure would be unthinkable he is bound to fail "because he will be unable – indeed he will refuse – to seize the radical moment at hand."

In a remarkable comparison, Baker compares Obama not to Franklin Roosevelt, who led America out of the Great Depression, but to President Herbert Hoover, Roosevelt’s predecessor and a man of great engineering and managerial competence, who however lost the political plot and the re-election on account of his dealing with the beginnings of the Depression. Baker’s contention is that like Hoover on the eve of the Great Depression, President Obama, in the midst of the great recession, will shy away from fundamental changes and will court political failure by opting for prudence and caution where creative boldness is required.

Obama’s dilemma

All of this is not to minimize the extent of the challenges that Obama is facing, or to cast doubts on the sincerity of the man. Writing in this newspaper following his inauguration, I described President Obama in paradoxical terms – "Insider as Outsider". He is a quintessentially conventional American caught in a vortex of radical expectations. In his inaugural, he justifiably articulated the radical potential of his nation’s founding promises, just as he had earlier argued with eloquence in the celebrated ‘race speech’ about America’s capacity to provide for equality between the races. But having raised expectations about ‘change’, he now faces attacks from the extreme right for doing too much and alienation by the liberal left for doing too little. Middle America, long accustomed to politically muddle through the experience and dream of material prosperity, is now cranky about the economic situation and cautious about doing anything too radical about it. That is Obama’s dilemma.

On the domestic front, the economic crisis, the health care mess and the energy and environmental problems are his inheritances and not his creations. The difference is conveniently lost on his rightwing detractors. Worse, in characterizing his approaches to addressing these issues as pathways to socialism, they have effectively put him on the defensive. They successfully mobilized vocal opposition throughout the summer months to his modest reform proposals and forced him to address the Congress and the country, in September, solely on the health issue. In a memorable line, he said that he is not the first president to try to resolve the health issue, but he is "determined to be the last."

President Clinton has given the warning the vast rightwing conspirators are doing to the Obama presidency what they did to him during his eight years in office. Unlike the erratic genius that Bill Clinton was, Barack Obama is perfection personified, save for the trip to Copenhagen to make a pitch for hometown Chicago to win the hosting rights for the 2016 Olympics. But that perfection has not helped him with his rightwing opponents. The naivety of his campaign undertaking to bring the Republicans and Democrats together to work on common issues must surely have dawned on him by now.

Bill Clinton publicly laughed at the young pretender’s innocence, although as President, Clinton kept moving to the right to fight and beat the Republicans in their own game, and he got away with it because of the good times of the dot.com economy. Obama does not have the luxury now to be anything but radical and move to the left on all domestic fronts – the economy, health, energy and the environment. The defeats in New Jersey and Virginia will make the move even harder now than before.

Ironically, President Obama might be having fewer detractors abroad than at home. The premature award of the Nobel Prize for peace caused greater cynicism within America than elsewhere. As on the domestic front, he has to cope with the two bleeding legacies of Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the problem of Pakistan will create its own challenges for Washington. But Obama has tried hard to change America’s image in the world, although he seems to be boxing himself in Afghanistan mostly to reinforce his credentials as Commander in Chief at home. In so doing, he is again alienating many Democrats and the more idealistic of his supporters who do not see any reason for Obama continuing in Afghanistan what he is discontinuing in Iraq.