August 04, 2011. Copyright 2011, Graphic News. All rights reserved

As U.S. president Barack Obama turns 50, can he convince Americans to give him a second term?
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, August 04, Graphic News:  He is the president who fulfilled the dream for millions of his countrymen and women; the first man of colour to move into the White House. But since his ecstatic reception in January 2009, where Inauguration Day crowds set a new attendance record for any event held in Washington DC, Barack Hussein Obama has suffered a series of political "humblings". These culminated in the mid-term elections of November 2010 when his Democrat party lost 63 seats in the House of Representatives and, with them, overall control of the lower house. The president admitted it was a "shellacking" and said too few Americans had felt the benefit of his economic stimulus programme, launched the month after he took office: a $787 billion dollar package to help pull the country out of recession. That now seems small beer compared to the mighty battle he's fighting against hard-line Republicans reluctant to help him negotiate an increase in the federal government's debt ceiling -- the amount it needs to meet its payments -- from its April 2011 setting of $14.29 trillion.
 
He might have won a few nods from Republican opponents had his plans to make America less dependent on overseas oil and gas, by granting more licences for drilling operations around the U.S. coastline, not been thwarted by the disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year. And while he undoubtedly followed through on voter expectation and brought home the troops from Iraq -- he announced the end of combat operations there on August 31, 2010 -- he had to commit 30,000 more to the war in Afghanistan. The Guantanamo Bay detention centre he vowed to close remains open, still holding detainees from the previous administration's War on Terror. And now he is controversially involved, along with British and French allies, in Libya, in a none-too-swift operation to assist the rebel uprising against that country's leader, Muammar Gaddafi. Not even belated success in "taking out" Osama bin Laden, the Al-Qaeda mastermind of 9/11, boosted Obama's polls beyond a month-long blip.
 
Yet the international standing of the Hawaiian-born 44th President -- and his First Lady, Michelle -- remains high. He was the first U.S. leader ever to address both houses of parliament on a visit to the UK in May and the first in modern times to receive the Nobel Peace Prize while in office. In Cairo, two years ago, he called for the United States and the Muslim world to "seek common ground". And he can, after all, take heart from those approval ratings back home, which fell from 68 percent at his election to 41 percent a year ago (Aug. 2010). They follow a very similar trend to those of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, two hugely popular presidents from either side of the political divide, who both went on to win a second term. The 2012 campaign is officially up and running, its slogan: "It begins with us". Millions of low-paid Americans, now covered by health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, car workers at General Motors who had their jobs secured in a government buy-out, not to mention the gay lobby who have seen Obama repeal the hated "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" law suppressing homosexuals in the military, will agree with that.
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