What’s up with Obama?

Students of US politics should be keeping a close eye on the Obama presidency as a case study on leadership stretch and the constitutional limits of the office.

The Framers of the Constitution could not have envisioned that the President would become the most powerful man in the world, but it should be remembered that domestically the President of the United States is hamstrung by the Constitution.

Without meaning to pre-empt a fptp article I am working on at the moment, in short expectations of what the White House incumbent should achieve and the formal powers available to him are really quite different things.

It may surprise readers of the blog, but in domestic terms it’s much fairer to say that the single individual who most shapes the daily lives of citizens would be the state governor. Transport, education, tax and other social and economic policies lay with the man or woman who has the keys to the Governor’s mansion.

Obama was never realistically going to live up to expectations placed on him. As a former governor of NY said, campaigns are in poetry and government is in prose. And Obama’s campaign poetry was more dynamically and beautifully orated than probably any politician who ever hit the stump.

It is well known that Obama has faced fierce opposition from the Republicans, but his job has been made more difficult by the fact that his most fervent supporters on the left appear to have lost faith.

Have a look at this feature in today’s Observer about how Jon Stewart has turned to the dark side…click