By James Neilson

The progressive wing of the US journalistic establishment fell in love with Barack Obama as soon as it saw him striding towards the White House. That was why the New York Times, the Washington Post et al declined to subject him to the nit-picking scrutiny rivals such as Sarah Palin had to endure. They made out that only Republican grouches and gun-toting rednecks unable to stomach the idea of a mixed-race president felt uneasy about his lack of administrative experience, his sketchy knowledge of international affairs and his links with some distinctly unsavoury characters. As far as Obama’s fervent admirers were concerned, he was a prodigiously talented man who, after repairing the damage done by George W. Bush, would restore his country to its long-lost status as a “city upon a hill”, a beacon of hope for all mankind.

The euphoria melted away with surprising speed.  Though Obama still enjoys the warm support of the progressive media in the United States, elsewhere their counterparts are wondering aloud if he is up to the job. While leftwingers bewail his inability to transform the US overnight, centrists see him being overwhelmed by difficulties both at home and abroad due to his evident inability to make his fellow Democrats do his bidding.    
  Bill Clinton, wounded by his wife’s failure to win the party’s nomination, once said that “Obama has the political instinct of a Chicago thug”. If only that were true. Obama’s main problem right now is the growing feeling that, far from being tough, he is too much of a soft touch and is therefore unable to stand up to trade union heavies, Democrat power-brokers and lobbyists employed by people who invested in his campaign, let alone unscrupulous foreign leaders like Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chávez.
   When a US president acquires a reputation for weakness, just about everything he does helps confirm it. The decision to scrap the missile shield that was to be set up in Poland and the Czech Republic may have been as wise as his spokesmen insist, but many interpreted it as a gratuitous concession to the Russians who quickly let it be known that there would be no quid pro quo. A case can also be made for his attempt to get on better terms with Iran’s theocratic regime, but his way of handling relations with Ahmadinejad and company laid him open to charges of appeasement and of being willing to throw Israel under the nuclear bus if that is what he thinks it will take for the US to cosy up to “the Moslem world”.
    Even worse has been Obama’s approach to the Afghan imbroglio. After months of being gung-ho about the fight against the Taliban, he is now saying he has to get “the strategy right” before committing any more troops, in this way informing the world that despite his enthusiasm for what he called a “war of necessity” he is unsure what it is all about and is afraid of getting bogged down.  In today’s interconnected world, dithering in public about such matters is extremely dangerous; the Islamic militants know perfectly well that the battle that counts most is the one being waged in the minds of North Americans, so they must suspect that as Obama is more interested in finding an exit than in defeating them, all they need do is hang in there. 
   And as though all that were not enough, Obama may well have inadvertently fired the first shots in a trade war with China by slapping a 35 percent tariff on tyre imports in order to please his trade-union backers. If the word gets around that the US has turned protectionist, other countries will follow suit, with disastrous consequences for the world economy.
   His rhetoric about the alleged need to take drastic measures to combat “climate change” and save the planet from “an irreversible catastrophe” could prove equally harmful to him.  On the one hand, the people who are convinced that “this crazy weather we’ve been having”, as John Ashbery once put it, is caused by industrial pollution are upset because to their mind Obama in unwilling to go far enough, which is not surprising as some of them think nothing less than the dismantling of the US economy is called for; on the other, sceptics who point out that average temperatures are now lower than they were a couple of years ago and assume that the whole climate warming business is nonsense and that such variations as there are can be attributed to sun spots or the like, fear that the US government is about to condemn North Americans to decades of depression by spending zillions of dollars building gigantic windmills and forcing them to buy electric buggies.
   Some “liberals” are gloomily predicting that Obama will turn out to be a one-term president.  Conservatives see him as another Jimmy Carter, in their view one of the worst presidents ever, who will devote his years in office to apologizing for his country’s wickedness and retreating on every front he can think of. However, even Obama’s harshest critics do not suppose that Hillary Clinton or John McCain would have handled the economy much better, and had such hawkish individuals taken a firmer line towards the rest of the world they would by now be under fierce attack from the many who assume that the US is unpopular in much of the world because of its imperialistic arrogance. Perhaps the US presidency is too big a job for any mere mortal and that, like the later Roman emperors, whoever is rash enough to take it on is doomed to failure.