It is not for me to say if the President has overstepped constitutional boundaries but the measures he intends to implement do look rather reasonable, at first glance. Besides, America is doing well in the macro-sphere and attracts. The country is creative, becoming energy independent, while Wall Street is reaching to the skies and the dollar rules. In comparison, the rest of the world looks like a poorhouse fair.
Nevertheless, the mood in the United States remains impervious to the numbers. The man in the street is not cognizant of what works and is more concerned with what is perceived as a country in retreat internationally. The health-care fiasco, the Piketty narrative and the political nausea have alienated Main Street. Obama's style has not helped in healing the morale or in reasoning with Congress, which feels despised on all sides.
The observer can only be further destabilized seeing how a world, for an unforeseeable term divided, has become stuck in a Darwin-like predicament. In Ukraine (when are they going to study Finland's Kekkonen strategic savoir faire ?), Iran, the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and Africa, the pendulum swings towards the law of the stronger rather than to the rule of law.
It is unfair to relate all that goes wrong to an American lack of involvement. The United States is everywhere, but lately it has become too arduous to intervene since the everywhere is taken over by the nowhere.
States collapse, hybrids appear, frontiers no longer apply, covenants are disregarded. When a superpower finds fewer partners than before, it will retreat. It is ironical that, for the time being, the United States has only China, which can act as (almost) equal nemesis, competitor and partner. Maybe that is why President Obama chose to act on immigration the way he did, after returning from a successful trip to Beijing. His copycat decision has a Chinese footprint.
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