The slogan of “Change” raised by Candidate Obama during his presidential campaign has not only stirred up the dreams of the majority of Americans, but has in fact reached beyond their borders, where prevails the same feeling of the necessity of closing the chapter of the Bush Administration, the recklessness of which the world long suffered from. However, the problem which quickly became apparent is that change in democratic countries follows procedures that cannot be leapt over and traditions that cannot be broken, and that problems abroad hold complexities and specificities that do not allow for rushed solutions and can sometimes bring mediators to what they had not intended. The need for change was so strong that everyone got carried away and thought that it would happen simply by its candidate winning. Yet only one year later, it seems as if disappointment has become the shared lot of the Americans and the world, each for their own reasons. On the domestic level, conservative right-wing theorists who were defeated by Obama claim that his success came at the hands of a large number of centrists who sought only to punish Bush “the idiot”, but did not give the new president an open-ended mandate to put forth laws that would disturb the monotony of their lives, threaten the values prevalent in their small communities and change the ideas they grew up on ever since America was discovered. This is why they have decided to put an end to a plan they considered to be a threat to the very bases of capitalism, which regulate the differences between rich and poor, and between those who are and those who are not entitled healthcare. Obama's supporters reply that it was necessary to start implementing his program the moment he reached the presidency, making use of the momentum of the support he had received, and that postponing this will mean that he will not be able to produce any change later on, because he will be busy starting from the beginning of his third year in office with the battle for reelection. Moreover, they assert that they never once doubted that the battle for change would be difficult and would require a tremendous effort, due to the nature of the Americans who tend towards stability and slow gradual processes. And if the American people gave the President what resembles a warning when they defeated his candidate in Massachusetts, traditionally a stronghold for the Democrats, and placed the fate of his reform projects before the unknown, the prime concern for voters remains the unemployment rate and the economic recession, the course of which the Obama Administration has so far failed to alter, not because of any shortcoming on its part, but because of the gravity of the situation it inherited and the profusion of crises it has had to deal with. Perhaps it has become necessary for it itself to change and to modify its approach to the problems and their solutions. Abroad, where openness, dialogue and positivity had been the headlines of the discourse Obama directed to the world, and especially to the Muslim and Arab part of it, he seems to have reached a dead-end, as problems are becoming increasingly difficult, and in fact have become insoluble, due to the obstinacy of the parties involved and the increasing threat of extremist organizations and groups. It seems that the possibility of renewed confrontations in and around the region has become strongly likely, especially with the battle against Al-Qaeda moving to new arenas like Yemen and the terrorist organization successfully breaching the US's security apparatus in several places, with the Americans discovering that Afghanistan does not resemble Iraq, that the success achieved there cannot be duplicated here and that the situation in this country has a closer semblance to cosmic black holes that engulf all that approaches them, and with Washington having ascertained that the extremists are after a war between India and Pakistan, where the frightening nuclear dimension might be unleashed, and having reached the conviction that Iran has rejected the outstretched hand and does not accept the dialogue which might paralyze its efforts to complete its nuclear program, and that sanctions must be strengthened and other options perhaps pondered. The conclusion is that Obama has fallen victim to his own slogan, that he is changing, and that he must change even more.
