Obama: No we can’t lie anymore, the slogan is what we bought into

I COULD count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve slept in a bedroom with another woman.

Never mind two. In fact, now that I think of it, I could count such incidents on one finger. So when a famous woman asked me recently if I remembered the night that the two of us shared a bedroom with a third woman, recalling it was not a problem.

The two of them were in the double bed. I was on a mattress on the floor. The two of them slept like babies. I sat crosslegged under a tented duvet, trying to complete and transmit a report to this newspaper, occasionally putting my head outside the tent to breathe.

Washington, the night before Barack Obama’s inauguration. More journalists, producers, camera operators and commentators stuffed into a rented house in suburban Washington than the house had ever been intended to contain. All of them awake long before dawn, showering quickly and in procession before setting out in the dark to get to the Mall.

Those of us who hadn’t slept were just as cheerfully awake as those who had. We were on our way to witness the making of history, and, as we nodded to other walkers all headed in the same direction, it was as if we were part of a benign conspiracy. The election of Obama said as much about us as it said about him. Those who had spotted him long before he indicated his intent to run against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination patted ourselves on the back: We were early adopters.

We were smart enough to spot a good mind when we saw it, to identify a great communicator before the masses began to fall in love with this slender academic. We were smugly sure that the inauguration would usher in a new era for America. One of peace and progress, prosperity and culture. But above all, one of superb communication by the commander in chief.

We were wrong. It hurts to admit it, but we were wrong. The promises were reneged on. We expected that some of them might not be fulfilled in their totality. Just as the Fine Gael-Labour folk found more (or perhaps less, depending on how you look at it) in the books when they took over from the Fianna Fáil-Green administration, so Obama, briefed in total detail by his people, began to have second and third thoughts about what had seemed simple and easy during his candidature.

He didn’t do what he had said he would do. But what was even more strange was this. He stopped being a great communicator. He. Just. Stopped.

Now, being a sensible detached objective commentator, the task for people like me was to acknowledge the change straight away. Instead, like everybody who gets bought in to a charismatic individual, my response was more nuanced. I lied. I lied to myself that the inauguration speech was a stunner, when, in reality it was just about adequate, but juiced by the emotion of the day into something more than adequate. I lied, because the aura around him took a while to dissipate.

In any campaign, one candidate grabs media attention and tattoos an interpretation of themselves on the mind of the public that takes a long, long time to fade. The campaign debates were such an imprinting experience. The early ones showed a contrast between a frankly testy Hillary Clinton and a calmly good-humoured Obama which made the former seem unlikeable and argumentative and sure of herself.

Then came the ones with the Republican candidate, John McCain, when an old war hero struggled with his temper and with trying to remember killer lines prepared for him in advance, while a lithe younger man prowled the stage while thinking out loud. That he thought out loud in conceptual and sometimes esoteric language seemed an advantage. He was raising the tone of the discourse above the soundbites and slogans and nudge-nudge thumbs-uppery of George W Bush, of which we were all good and sick.

Of course, there was that slogan audiences at rallies started to cry out for, like the chorus of a song they particularly liked: “Yes we can.” Vague. Warm. Populist. Meaning nothing in particular, opponents of Obama shrilled. Those of us who got Obama smiled patronisingly. You had to understand, we explained, “yes we can” was not something Obama said all the time. It had just gone viral because America (indeed, the world) yearned, at this time of threat, for something unequivocally inclusive and positive. Everybody wanted a new kind of politics, and the “yes we can” was like an aspiration: If we said it often enough, it would become functional truth. Gitmo would close, American troops would be brought home and a new era — Camelot with concern — would happen in the White House.

We were wrong. The slogan was the only thing people remembered. We sold it back to him with such conviction that when he visited Ireland, he brought the crowds between Trinity College and Bank of Ireland to ecstasy by saying it in Irish.

We projected on to him hopes and dreams he had never set out to personify, and then loved him for being what we perceived him to be.

Cal Thomas, the right-wing US columnist, hammering home the failures of the early months on Matt Cooper’s The Last Word programme, pointed out that if a Republican had failed on so many fronts, he would have been excoriated, but that Democrats always — when it’s one of their own who doesn’t deliver — find explanations to justify or excuse their man’s non-delivery.

It wasn’t easy to find explanations or excuses for the President’s tardy response to natural disasters and oil spills. It was even more difficult to find explanations for what seemed a radical change in his communication. Instead of inspiration, he gave analysis. Instead of stirring oratory, he lectured, using phrases like “bipartisanship” to Americans suffering a massive decline in their income, self-respect and expectation.

Instead of clear, decisive world leadership, he emerged as a man immersed in process, portrayed in Woodward’s book, The Obama Wars, as spending hours, days and weeks engaged in debate with advisors, apparently persuaded that, given enough analysis, the right decision would emerge. Decisions do not emerge. They get taken.

Now, as he nears the end of his first term, his chances of a second depend on money and the paucity of opposing candidates. It has been said the most dangerous leaders are those with big ideas and the passion to enmesh the masses in those big ideas. To that extent, Barack Obama does not seem to be dangerous. He will analyse and compromise, adjust and explain. That’s what he does: No Drama Obama. It’s hard, though, to relinquish the hope of something different, and better.