Obama has to get his act together for some change we can believe in

PRESIDENT Barack Obama flew into London last night on his first foreign trip since taking office. To say British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is pleased to be the first foreign head of government to host The Big O is an understatement. Downing Street will have forgiven and forgotten that the White House didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet the last time the two leaders met.

Taoiseach Brian Cowen gave Obama a bowlful of weeds when he went to Washington but Brown took a pen fashioned from the anti-slavery ship HMS Gannet and a first edition of Martin Gilbert’s monumental biography of Winston Churchill. He got a boxed DVD set of “classic American movies” in return. If Brown had a sense of humour, he would repay the compliment this time by wrapping up a few old Stevie Wonder CDs.

More seriously, Brown is glad to have him but Obama is probably equally glad to get away. Yes, it is only Day 72 and no time to be making judgments. But it would be equally foolish to pretend the 44th presidency is going swimmingly.

Contrary to promises from Team Obama, the smoothest transition in history ground to a halt the minute Bush flew back to Texas. Nominee after nominee has dropped out due to some scandal or conflict of interest or another. More workaday leaders around the world can be permitted a wry smile: the real cool dude is human after all. All that inexperience is starting to show.

Rarely has the mood in Washington deteriorated so soon into a presidency, I was told last week. Obama might be a thousand times more eloquent than his predecessor but even Bush was working across the aisle to get things done at this stage eight years ago. And he had only been elected by a hanging chad, remember.

The old adage about student politics being so vicious because so little is at stake doesn’t apply to US high politics right now. On the contrary, it is precisely because politicians in Washington, as elsewhere, sincerely believe the decisions being made now will shape lives for years to come that the mood is so scratchy. And it’s not just because the Republican Party feels jilted that Obama is finding the going tough: the polls suggest Independent voters are trending negatively too. In part, as in most advanced Western democracies, it’s down to the economy, stupid. John McCain was pilloried by the Democrats last September for suggesting the American economy was “fundamentally sound” when the Dow Jones stood at 11,000 and unemployment at 6% . Now Obama says the same thing — but the Dow is 4,000 points lower and unemployment 2% higher.

To add insult to injury, when questioned about the market, Obama breezily compared it to a tracking poll in politics. “It bobs up and down day to day,” he said. “If only”, many Americans retort angrily. The value of stocks isn’t some mere popularity index. In a society where most people own shares, their livelihoods and retirement savings depend on the Dow cruising along.

The president then compounded the hurt by claiming Washington was in “a tizzy” over $165m in bonuses paid to the top executives of failed insurance giant AIG.

“A distraction” his chief of staff called it. And, yes, in the scheme of things $165m is small beer but wasn’t a comparatively minor event always going to become the focus of public anger about government bailouts? Don’t those über-sophisticates around Obama ever read the newspapers’ foreign pages? This basic lack of emotional intelligence – the great asset in the armoury of leaders like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair — combines with an apparent desire to rewrite the global centre-left’s contract with their electorates. Essentially, that project involved accepting the tenets of the market economy and harnessing the proceeds for progressive ends. In his actions to date, though, President Obama is acting much more like Senator Obama, he with the spectacularly left-wing voting record, than like Candidate Obama, the classical centrist he portrayed himself as once Hillary had been despatched.

Not only is his stimulus package proportionately several times larger than that of most large economies but the vast bulk of the spending doesn’t come on stream until long after his own officials predict the recession in America will have well and truly passed. In other words, it is spending for the ideological sake of it, not spending to counterbalance the economic cycle.

Nothing wrong with that, you might say: the US is merely moving in the direction of the rest of the civilised world. Except this isn’t what the American people were promised. During the campaign, he vilified Bush for running up a $3 trillion deficit. He is now planning to double it. Having condemned earmarks — frequently wasteful spending provisions directed at Congress members’ pet projects — he now waves through thousands of them to keep his fellow Democrats sweet. Is this the new politics, Americans ask? Repudiating Clintonomics, he is taxing and spending with gay abandon. In the foreign policy realm, things are going no better. Hillary was sent to China with the message human rights don’t matter — and the Red Army promptly ordered another crackdown. She was despatched to Russia to “reset” relations, selling out the Poles in the process, and came back humiliated. Pakistan’s corrupt elite is being showered with riches even as they simultaneously aid and abet those who blow up American troops in Afghanistan. He tries to be rational with the Iranians and they interpret it as weakness. North Korea is more belligerent than ever.

Oh dear, oh dear, of dear. Frankly, on current form, Barack Obama is taking America places it doesn’t want to go. He might still be popular. His policies are not.

Any candidate who promised so much was bound to disappoint. Recall his words on the night of the election: “Where we are met with cynicism and doubt and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people. Yes. We. Can.”

But when people see cynicism dressed up as the politics of hope and are asked to hop on for the ride they tend to respond with another timeless creed: “No. We. Won’t.”

All American presidents eventually deplete their political capital. Some do so advancing great but difficult causes. Others squander it through breaches of faith. Of course, Obama still has vast reserves of goodwill behind him. But he will need to redeploy his formidable skills to fewer, better projects if he is to regain his footing.

The gaffe about his bowling skills being “like the Special Olympics” illustrated only too well Obama’s current problem.

Allow him to deviate off the prepared script and he becomes uncomfortable and unfunny. There was a hint of this during the campaign, in fairness. Hillary Clinton won the debates hands down but couldn’t compete when it came to soaring rhetoric.

Even Democrats I talk to worry they might have bought style over substance. The first two months have been marked by amateurism at home and naïveté abroad. If he is to go on to become a great president the candidate of change needs to do just that.