U.S. President Barack Obama is shown arriving at the Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders Presidential Summit in Washington, D.C. The three-day summit brings together 500 of sub-Saharan Africa's young leaders to meet with business and governmental leaders from the United States. Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images WASHINGTON — To see Barack Obama vault out of a groping, greying presidency and into a hotel ballroom filled with men and women standing on their chairs and pumping their fists and shouting “We want selfies!” is to travel back in time to the summer of 2008, although nobody knew what a selfie was, way back then.
Six years ago, Newsweek was hailing what it called the nation’s “unabashed love” for its incoming president. “He has a chance to realign the national landscape and create a new government ideology for the West,” the magazine crowed. In Denver, the last week of that July, 100,000 of us jammed a football stadium to see him accept a summons to change the world.
Six years later, Obama’s 40 per cent approval rating signifies that three-fifths of Americans are abashed that he ever was elected in the first place. A deathscape of war from Donetsk to Damascus belies his vacuous Nobel Peace Prize, and a solid majority of U.S. voters told a pollster last week that, granted a do-over of 2012, they would select the wise and steadying hand of W. Mitt Romney.
So I am almost nostalgic as I watch 500 people explode in exultation at Obama’s arrival for a speech and a Q and A at a downtown hotel, and it is especially heartwarming in this congressional election year to be able to report that the Wangler in Chief has not come to ask them for money. The audience is, instead, half a thousand Young African Leaders from three dozen countries, flown to Washington by the U.S. government to promote entrepreneurship, engage socially, and ratify Obama’s humanitarian initiatives on a continent that has not been sufficiently bloodied or famished during his presidency to make many headlines in America at all.
When the program begins, the 44th president stands on a riser and shouts out Young Leaders named Ndiaye and Mkandawire and Ngom. Pacing the platform and speaking without notes, he heralds the continent’s rapidly decreasing toll of malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS, and infant and maternal mortality, and offers informed comments on subjects ranging from export tariffs in Madagascar to Liberian antitrust law. He seems truly engaged and pleased with himself, the arisen son of his hearers’ fathers.
“The point of all of this is we believe in you,” he says. “I believe in you. I believe in every one of you who are doing just extraordinary things.”
Seated directly in front of me is a woman named Sarah Ferdjani, wearing a traditional cotton scarf and a Hook ’Em Horns lapel pin from the University of Texas, where, in a meaningful reversal of recent history, the African helped to deliver charity meals to hungry American families. (Each Young Leader’s fellowship includes a term at a U.S. college.)
In Niamey, the capital of sandy, radioactive Niger, Ferdjani works for the World Food Program and has started her own business manufacturing organic hair-care and beauty products. (The former French colony is one of the world’s principal suppliers of uranium ore, while French troops patrol its Saharan wastes against Islamist rebels.) She is erudite, trim and 21st-century web-smart. But when Barack Obama bounces into the ballroom, Ferdjani goes absolutely nuts.
“What happened to the man who promised so much Hope and Change?” I ask the young businesswoman, after she calms down.
“What happened to him?” the African replies, with a sigh. “He became president.”
“People thought he was Superman, he was a superhero, there was ‘Yes we can’ and all those things,” Ferdjani explains. “People thought he would solve all the problems and do everything. Now, we still have a lot do to, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with him.”
Nearby, in a motorized wheelchair, is Michael Mihayo, a social welfare officer from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, who has been unable to walk since contracting polio at the age of three.
“I feel that Barack Obama values me,” Mihayo says. “He values me, and he understands that I have a contribution to make to my family, to my country, and to the world. There is no discrimination against me from disability, no discrimination from race, no discrimination from religion, and Obama is committed to this.”
“Why do you think he has become so unpopular in this country?” I ask.
“It’s not easy to be loved by everybody,” the Young Leader answers. “Other people will always trash you. America cannot do it alone. I think that the interference in the other countries sometimes doesn’t work out so well.”
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