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I’m Barack Obama, former US president. It’s 2061, which also makes me the oldest living past president of this country, though I’m so kicking fit I could run one more term.

I’m out walking the dog when Joe (not Biden, stupid, my great grandson, who’s spending the summer with me here at Kenwood) joins in, huffing.
“How’s it going, partner?” I ask.
He says nothing.
“Hello, you listening?”
Still nothing.

“You don’t want to tell me? OK. By the way, I was the one who kicked out ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ from this country fifty years ago.”
“They say you pushed us back fifty years,” he cut in suddenly.
“Who’s they?”
“The neighbourhood boys. They say you and George Bush were two of a kind, cutting across the party divide.”

“That’s unkind. He’s the one who started the fire … er, the wars. I brought closure. Didn’t I end the war in Iraq just as I’d promised in my election manifesto, fifty years to this Christmas? Afghanistan was a different issue.”

“That’s it?”
“Of course not. I also got the healthcare legislation passed, allowing children to be covered under their parents’ insurance until the age of 26, expanding Medicaid to all individuals under age 65 with incomes up to 133% of the federal poverty level, among other things. And didn’t I protect America? That night Osama was taken out, I was the one watching it in that room, not Dubya. Didn’t I go after Taliban, al Qaeda? Pushed us back? I brought change to America.”

“And left it with small change ... You also said you’d revitalise the economy. How come we sank deeper in debt? You said you’d renew American leadership. Then how did China steal our goat?”
“Economy? What do you know about the economy kid? I had Tim and Ben by my side and our mint working overtime. We pumped in all the dollars the economy needed after Subprime exploded and the derivatives started taking down our world, taking away our jobs, houses, cars as the slowdown took hold. We tried our might to bring down deficit, trimming benefits, raising taxes on the rich and on all those outsourcing our jobs… American jobs. We even raised the debt ceiling by a whopping $2.4 trillion that year, to dodge a sovereign default. Imagine where that would have landed the world.”

“Did you revitalise the economy?”
“Well, we plugged ‘em as they came, but there were far too many holes. Our deficit rose with every largesse. We couldn’t force enough austerity. Our debt was running up way too fast, way faster than our income. The government was indebted, but so were the people. There was no way they could have bailed us out. So, we printed all the money we needed, and printed …”
“Did it help?”

“As a quick fix? Yes. Longer term, the more we printed, the more debased our currency got, losing value against other currencies, so we ended up paying more for all the goods and services we were importing. But why blame me? I didn’t push Americans into consumerism, Alan did. You go ask Malia and Sasha, Michelle and I always taught them to save, see what they were spending on … we were good parents.”

“What about global leadership? How’d you score? How come China forces our hands in every little thing now? And why’s India able to push its way around everywhere and we are not?”
“Ah, the Chinese! We got sucked in kid. We kept importing everyday needs from them, paying top dollar, and they kept pumping the dollars back in by buying our government securities, until we owed them so much they could stake claim to presidency.

Now we do their biding, though I dare say they need us just as much as we do them. India’s a different story — a curious case of an economy growing despite the government, not entirely because of it. And it’s a very large economy at that, which makes it kind of unpredictable, and good to have on your side than on the other. But, you take it from me, the rest of the world’s still ours to lead — more or less.”

[The title of the article is from a book by New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman, much of whose content stands against the tenets established by the Keynesian-turned-free market exponent Milton Friedman, Nobel laureate and advisor to President Ronald Reagan. Looking back, America’s fall from grace began there — before Vietnam.]

(As foreseen by Subrat Mohapatra)