Osama gone, hunger gnaws

Washington, Sept. 10: This ought to have been President Barack Obama's finest hour, travelling to New York's "Ground Zero" on Sunday morning to attend the 10th anniversary commemoration ceremony of the terrorist attacks that changed the world.

The mastermind of the September 11 attacks is dead. Images of Osama bin Laden's killing are still fresh in American minds.

A mere four-and-a-half months have passed since the military, of which Obama is commander-in-chief, took out Osama in one of the most daring counter-terrorism operations that will ever be.

What the world will see on Sunday morning, however, is a US President, sombre and as presidential as he needs to be but wearing an invisible mask to hide the uncomfortable reality that his finest hour ' and that of the nation and people he leads ' has passed.

It is typical of what America is going through that Obama signed a bill that eliminated the nearly four-decade-old "Food Stamp" programme that enabled poor people in this country to make both ends meet.

Well, Obama didn't quite eliminate it. He simply renamed it "Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme", appropriately abbreviated to SNAP. How nice!

The new bill superseded a 1974 Act of Congress, which required all states to offer food benefits to poor households through the US department of agriculture.

In America, where the yardstick of success is wealth, the stigma attached to poverty can only be believed when it is seen. And food stamps had come to represent the retail face of that stigma.

At stores that accept food stamps ' sorry, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme ' poor customers edge closer to checkout cashiers to whisper that they are using SNAP Electronic Benefit Transfer cards and not paying with cash or credit cards for their food purchases.

The more well-off customers look the other way, some uncomfortably, but most of them pretending that they do not see what is going on.

But Obama's burden is that an incredible 46 million Americans now survive on food stamps. That is one out of every six-and-a-half Americans.

Actually, that national figure is a misrepresentation of poverty in Obama's America. In Alabama, one in three persons was on food stamps in mid-2011. In the national capital of Washington, one in every five would sleep hungry if they did not have access to food stamps.

In the last four years, the rise in the number of Americans seeking recourse to food stamps has been marginally under 75 per cent.

So, with a snap of his fingers, Obama changed the programme to SNAP. No doubt, "Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme" sounds better than "food stamps", which are associated with failure.

Eligibility requirements are a bureaucratic maze but broadly, a household's monthly income must be less than $1,174 to make it eligible for SNAP benefits.

Trust American capitalism to spot an opportunity for profit even in adversity. McDonald's, KFC and other fast food chains now want to accept food stamps.

SNAP rules do not allow beneficiaries to buy hot food or any food fit to be consumed on the premises where they are prepared. But for McDonald's, Taco Bell and the like, even a small percentage of 46 million new customers is a tempting recourse to endless ringing of the till.

Sadly, it is also typical of America, which is commemorating the 10th anniversary of September 11, that the great national debate is on whether food stamps should cover junk food.

Not because fast food is to nutrition what indigestion is to digestion. No. The class of Americans who regularly patronise McDonald's ' the not-so-rich but ones who don't need food stamps ' are insulted that they will be equated with the teeming poor if SNAP beneficiaries begin to flood fast food outlets.

America's big weakness as it commemorates the 9/11 anniversary is that it has a President who came into office in 2009 with great hopes, but has since made "compromise" his middle name.

His compromises with the Republicans and with his own party's right wing in the hope of a second term in the White House are making lives tougher for ordinary Americans, a challenge that will weaken this country in the long run in a way the perpetrators of 9/11 could not.

Now, more than at any other time in contemporary memory, there are "two Americas", as John Edwards, who unsuccessfully fought Obama during the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, was fond of saying.

"The truth is, we still live in a country where there are two different Americas. One for all of those people who have lived the American dream and don't have to worry, and another for most Americans ' everybody else who struggle to make ends meet every single day. It doesn't have to be that way," Edwards told the Democratic National Convention in 2004.

It was the convention that catapulted Obama to the national stage when he delivered a rousing speech that is painful to recall this week as he repeatedly speaks to the nation this 9/11 anniversary, given the President's record in office.

Considering the terrorist attacks that American intelligence has repeatedly thwarted since that fateful day in 2001, it is reasonable to argue that the US is safer today than it was a decade ago.

Michael Gerson, who was head speechwriter to President George W. Bush, this week recalled in The Washington Post the environment in the White House the day after the attack.

"On Sept. 12, 2001, I entered the White House complex through blocks of eerily deserted streets, under cover of jets and helicopters. 'We have expanded the security perimeter,' I was told by a guard. Since those days, America has expanded its security perimeter beyond Constitution Avenue to rural Yemen and Abbottabad, Pakistan. That is the admirable achievement of two Presidents ' preventing America from becoming a battlefield once again."

That, no doubt, allows Americans to sleep more peacefully than the people of Karachi or Baghdad. Yet there are fundamental flaws that distort Obama's approach to national security.

This President has been eloquent among Muslims in Egypt, Indonesia and other Islamic countries, quoting from the Holy Quran and wanting to "speak the truth" about his country's relations with the Muslim world.

But Obama, whose middle name is Hussein, has not dared visit a single mosque within the US as President, lest it should inflame suspicions among large sections of Americans that he is a closet Muslim. That could cost him his re-election next year.

Obama was afraid even to go to the Golden Temple in Amritsar during his India visit. He would have had to cover his head in the shrine and that image would have been played back to the US, creating associations with Muslims in mosques.

"For someone who had hoped that President Obama would forge a different America, I must say I am sorely disappointed," Arun Gandhi, grandson of the Mahatma, wrote in a Washington Post blog on Wednesday.

He added that "the climax of this disappointment is his insensitive decision to inject religion into the 9/11 disaster by speaking in a cathedral on the 10th anniversary of an event that took the lives of Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Jews and God knows how many other believers and non-believers".

But that was not to be, perhaps through divine intervention. A crane repairing earthquake damage at the Washington National Cathedral overturned in a violent storm soon after Gandhi wrote this, damaging buildings in the cathedral.

At the time of writing, the President has abandoned plans to go to this cathedral on the anniversary of September 11.