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Professor Bart Kerremans of KUL

Prof. Dr. Bart Kerremans, a prominent American Studies specialist from KUL, gave a lecture on May 19, 2010 entitled "The Building and Stumbling Blocks of the Obama Presidency," in which he looked at the achievements and the prospect of the current Administration.  MyAmerica  interviewed Professor Kerremans.  Watch the video interview on YouTube or read the transcript below. 

How does an American Studies specialist view one and a half years of Obama Administration?

There is one major message that I try to bring in each of my lectures.  It is basically that the public perception of the American political system, even to some extent the United States itself, is that it is a presidential system, whereas in reality it is a system that is built on the interaction between the President and a number of other players, among which the members of Congress.  And that really complicates the ability of the president  to achieve, to realize his own political agenda.  But I do believe that the strategy of Obama, consisting of investing first in the economic stimulus package, and secondly investing in health care reform, even despite the political risks with the health care reform, the fact that he finally got his reform, increased his political capital in Washington DC.  And I think that this in the future will continue to help him to achieve other elements of his political agenda.  But a lot will depend on the outcome of the congressional elections later this year.

What do you consider to be President Obamaís major achievement so far?

I would certainly choose the reform of the health care insurance system.  The reason is twofold.  First of all, because it was a very controversial issue, and because, despite the fact that there was a lot of opposition, President Obama invested a lot of political capital in order to get the reform and, finally, after a while he got the reform, and secondly, since decades in the United States there is a discussion about health care reform,  about the problem of many Americans not being insured, about the problem of many Americans being underinsured,  and that in itself gives a certain significance to the fact that health care reform finally succeeded.  The fact that it was so controversial, that many administrations tried to reform it, the Clinton administration felt how difficult and complicated it was to do so, but at the end of the day Obama succeeded in getting this reform.  And I think that decades from today people will be looking back at the Obama administration's biggest achievements, specifically in the area of health care reform. 

President Obama has been criticized for not following through on certain issues.  Has he brought real change?

 I think that the answer to that question is an answer that should be related to the political system, the American political system.  The expectations vis-a-vis Obama have been extremely high, they have been too high.  That is certainly my opinion.  Why?  Because the American president is not the only player in Washington, he's an important player, but he needs to play the game with other players in Washington DC, and these other players will also, to some extent determine, affect to what extent the President will be able to achieve his political agenda.

Take the issue of financial reform. The debate on financial reform is still going on and maybe the case of Obama will achieve a certain success in that respect as well. One of the priorities he has is that the agency, becoming a Bureau now, for consumer financial interest protection, and he probably will get it, but the financial regulation issue also shows how a President, in case he wants to achieve something, needs to collaborate with people in the American Congress, and, different from what we have in Western Europe,  the level of party discipline in the United States is relatively low, meaning that you need to construct coalitions, meaning that you need to construct majorities, and that is not always simple specifically not in the Senate given the special majority you need over there.

Do you expect any major breakthrough before the November 2010 Congressional elections?

My expectation is that on financial regulation we will have a certain outcome, it will come, well it already took place in the House, there will be an outcome in the Senate and then we expect somewhere in June a bill on the table of the President's that he'll sign. That is certainly an issue that will come up. For other issues, I'm not sure. I noted that immigration is getting on top of the political agenda.  That in itself is not uncontroversial.  I know that energy legislation it on the table, and even there we don't know, for sure how large the support is in the US Congress and specifically the US Senate.  And of course the electoral dynamic is going to play increasingly a role, in the sense that members of Congress are running for office, are running for reelection,  and their minds are more on those elections in November 2nd this year and less and less on helping the President achieve his agenda.

How do you view President Obamaís chances for re-election?

I think that he has from the point of view of today and given a number of parameters that we can know today there is a relatively decent probability that Obama will be reelected, but it depends on a number of issues.  The first issue is who is going to be his opponent in the Republican Party.  If the Republicans think that they have a chance to win in the 2012 election,  they are going to put forward a very strong political figure that will compete with Obama.

The second issue is the economy, and that's an even more important issue.  And here I think that the situation is a little bit to the benefit of Obama.  He's become President at the depth of a very strong economic recession.  We do see that economic growth is picking up again at least on a quarterly basis, but we also see that unemployment remains relatively high and we also know that the high unemployment figures undermine the political capital of President Obama. We do expect however, that by 2012 the worst will be over, and that may benefit President Obama's efforts to be re-elected.

A comparison is made in this regard with Ronald Reagan.  Reagan was at the bottom of his popularity with a lower approval rating than Obama has now at the end of 1982, when Congressional elections were taking place, and at the beginning of 1983.  The reason was a deep economic recession and high unemployment levels.  Then by 1984, the economy was in much better shape, unemployment was going down, was getting lower and lower, and at the end of the day no real strong Democratic candidate took the risk to run against Ronald Reagan, which facilitated basically his re-election.   People expect that the same kind of logic would work to the benefit of Obama today.