Thread: Brits See Barky As An Air-Headed Showman

I said Obama could turn out to be America's Tony Blair - just a vacuous showman. This week we'll find out if U.S. voters agree

Last updated at 11:32 PM on 15th January 2010
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Hopes: Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the U.S. a year ago on the back of a wave of optimism

On Tuesday, almost a year to the day since he took the oath of office, Barack Obama faces a referendum on his presidency.

The jury is out and the verdict is far from certain.

Voters in Massachussetts go to the ballot box to elect a successor to Senator Edward Kennedy, who died of brain cancer last August.

It should be a formality for the Democrats, who have held the state since the late John F. Kennedy won the seat in 1953.

Yet the opinion polls are showing the Republican challenger running neck-and-neck with the Democratic establishment candidate, who until recently had been expected to stroll home without breaking sweat.

On his historic journey to the White House, Obama won Massachussetts by 26 clear percentage points. For the Democrats to forfeit this liberal fortress state would be unthinkable.

It would also have catastrophic consequences for Obama's flagship healthcare reforms.

A Republican victory on Tuesday would deprive the President of the 60-40 majority he needs to steer the bill through the Senate.

Failure to deliver even a watered-down version could cripple the President's ability to do business on Capitol Hill.

Although his plan for universal health coverage seemed superficially attractive, it now struggles to muster the support of just four out of ten Americans, as the multi-trillion-dollar scale of the tax increases needed to pay for it becomes apparent.

Voters are also deeply suspicious of a measure which would expand the power and bureaucracy of the government.

That's not the only front on which Obama is in trouble. He has been condemned for his tardy response to the abortive terror attack in a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day.

It was 72 hours before he broke his holiday in Hawaii to address a nervous nation.

He appeared open-necked and sought to pretend that this was the act of an isolated madman, before disappearing back to the golf course.

His reaction smacked of complacency, and more than a week passed until he admitted that the attack was linked to a wider conspiracy.

It was symptomatic of Obama's tendency to downplay the terrorist threat, seeing it not as a holy war but as a law-enforcement problem.

Instead of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab being held as an enemy combatant, he was read his rights, given a public defender and generally treated like a home boy who had held up an all-night gas station in Chicago.

This attitude plays into the President's determination to give a civilian trial in New York to the self-confessed mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheihk Mohammed, and his dismissal of the American Muslim soldier who carried out the Fort Hood massacre as a deranged loner with no links to militant Islam, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Obama's approach to terrorism is eerily reminiscent of Bill Clinton - lobbing drone missiles at camps abroad while sticking his fingers in his ears and hoping it goes away at home.

It's a contradictory strategy: bombing them to smithereens in their caves but according them all the rights of an American citizen if they're captured.

If the underpants bomb on the Detroit-bound Delta flight had detonated, his Presidency would be facing a full-blown crisis and the recriminations would be resonating from coast to coast.

This latest Al Qaeda attack was a stark repudiation of the new President's enlightened policy of 'engagement'.

Popularity: But initial enthusiasm for the first U.S. black president has waned and recent opinion polls show his popularity is the lowest of any first term president in history and he has disappointed many of his supporters

There was to be no more talk a 'war on terror' and the closure of Guantanamo Bay remains a priority.

His new solution to the global jihad was based on embracing the Muslim world and offering dialogue with rogue states such as Iran.

If only they can stop hating us, they'll stop killing us, Obama figured. That was the plan, anyway.

During his presidential campaign, Obama was at pains to differentiate between Bush's 'bad' war in Iraq and the 'good' war in Afghanistan.

But he is relying on a strictly limited troop surge to defeat the Taliban, eliminate Al Qaeda and stabilise the region.

If that fails, America has nowhere else to go, given that Obama has already set a deadline for withdrawal, in the cynical calculation that bringing the boys home will pay dividends in time for his re-election campaign.

All the Taliban has to do is sit tight for the next 18 months.

Meanwhile, Al Qaeda has decamped to Somalia and Yemen and continues to pose a clear and present danger to the U.S. homeland.

The crazies are still plotting to blow planes out of the sky and attack U.S. targets around the world.

Iran has interpreted Obama's willingness to 'engage' as a sign of weakness and redoubled its nuclear programme.

While George W. Bush has, with characteristic good grace, refrained from criticising his successor, former Vice President Dick Cheney has felt no such inhibitions, taking to the airwaves to bluntly accuse Obama of going soft on terror and making the U.S. a more dangerous place.

Although most of America's mainstream media organisations are still Obama groupies, Cheney has found an enthusiastic platform on Rupert Murdoch's Fox News network and among radio talkshow hosts led by Rush Limbaugh, a shrewd conservative who has effectively emerged as the defacto leader of the Right.

Just as Britain's Tories became discombobulated over Tony Blair, so the Republicans appeared to have suffered a nervous breakdown in the face of Obama's victory.

There is no outstanding leader in the Congress or the Senate, so the vacuum has been filled by Limof Baugh and Sarah Palin, the slightly batty, but wildly popular, former Alaskan governor and Vice Presidential candidate, who has just started a new career as a pundit on Fox.

Palin is the pin-up of the Tea Party movement, a grassroots, low-tax uprising against liberal big government and America's growing debt mountain. She may even run as an independent in 2012.

On the economic front, Obama's muchvaunted $800 billion 'stimulus' package found its way into 'pork barrel' public works projects and pay rises for the Democrats' paymasters in the big labour unions, while failing to make much of a dent on the wider economy.

Unemployment nationally is 10.4 per cent - twice that in some rust-belt states.

The costly 'cash for clunkers' programme - the U.S. equivalent of Britain's 'scrappage' scheme - gave a temporary fillip to car dealers by compressing sales into a short time period.

But the big winners were foreign manufacturers such as Toyota, and minimal benefit was felt in the depressed Motor City of Detroit.

The housing market has collapsed. Prices are back where they were a decade ago and experts think the bottom has still not been reached.

In an attempt to recapture the initiative, the President has unveiled a populist windfall tax on Wall Street designed to recoup the bail-out money, with no real idea of how much it will raise or whether it will derail recovery by halting bank lending.

Although Obama's policy of printing money, like Gordon Brown in Britain, may deliver a slight improvement in the numbers this year, economists such as Arthur Laffer - the father of Reaganomics - are predicting another crash in 2011.

By then, mid-term elections this November may have returned the Republicans to power in both houses of Congress and hobbled the rest of Obama's first - perhaps only - term.

Already the Republicans have taken back the governor's mansions in New Jersey and Virginia.

Of course, it wasn't supposed to be like this. When Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination and was subsequently anointed as America's first black president, anything seemed possible.

Who can forget his inspirational acceptance speech in Denver? '

Generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.'

OK, so he missed out the bit about world peace, an end to hunger and poverty, and a cure for cancer, free at the point of delivery.

And, inevitably, the reality was never going to measure up to the rhetoric.

Yet 12 months ago, when Obama took the oath of office on the steps of the Capitol building in Washington DC, there was a genuine sense of optimism, even among those who hadn't voted for him.

Almost eight years after 9/11, embroiled in two messy foreign wars and mired in an economic recession brought about by the hubris of rapacious bankers, America was facing a crisis of confidence.

Could this baby-faced senator from Illinois unite the nation and rebuild the country's battered reputation on the world stage?

The early signs were encouraging, as millions of people of every race, creed and colour turned out to celebrate Obama's election victory.

America was presenting a new face to the world - young, vibrant, diverse. Suddenly the buttoned-down WASPs in their Brooks Brothers suits seemed so last century.

It was virtually impossible not to get swept along by the tsunami of euphoria, a collective catharsis after the paranoia and backbiting of the Bush years.

International leaders clamoured to touch the hem of his garment, in the hope that some of the stardust would rub off.

But despite their infatuation with his glamour on the world stage, they weren't able to persuade him to seal a deal on global warming at Copenhagen and, regardless of the ludicrous award of a Nobel Peace Prize, his popularity failed to win the Olympics for his home town of Chicago.

At the end of his first year, Obama has disappointed just about everyone.

His personal ratings have fallen lower at this stage of his presidency than any incumbent since Reagan's first year. His party's approval ratings are scraping along below 25 per cent.

This time last January, I expressed the fear that Obama may be America's Tony Blair, little more than a vacuous showman. Now he resembles Jimmy Carter, the last, weak one-term Democratic president.

It is a mark of desperation that Bill Clinton has been wheeled in to Massachussetts to try to rally the base.

In an intriguing twist, a new book this week revealed that when Clinton was trying to persuade Teddy Kennedy to endorse Hillary in the 2008 race, he said of Obama: 'A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.'

Which only goes to prove that in America, as in Britain, socalled 'liberals' can get away with remarks which would see conservatives facing a lynch mob.

Now it falls to Clinton to try to rescue the Democrats and prop up the man he believes robbed his wife of the presidency.

If the lights go out in Massachussetts, the prospects for Obama are bleak.

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Brits See Barky As An Air-Headed Showman

the Brits would be right[/quote]