Obama honeymoon still hearts and roses?

Last weekend, in a bookshop in Charlottesville, Virginia - home of the University of Virginia - a children’s choir crooned a song the kids had written themselves. The lyrics went roughly like this: “Obama, he’s gonna, change the world!” Adorable - until you wonder what changes these well-dressed, attentive kids have in mind. Their own small worlds are probably quite comfortable.

And there’s something weird about American kids literally singing the praises of their dear leader.

The Obama honeymoon is still mostly hearts and roses. Americans don’t care whether the DVDs their leader gave British Prime Minister Gordon Brown actually work in British DVD players. The big issues here are unemployment, education and health policy, but Americans also just love the idea of White House vegetable gardens and virtual Town Hall meetings with the President.

President Obama surely embodies his nation’s view of its best self - the President from Central Casting, who makes the hearts of his country “folk” swell with pride. Graceful, thin, refined, polite, mixed-race, intelligent, thoughtful, lovely family, did I say thin? … Etcetera. What party-pooper could complain?

Except … the inauguration champagne bottles had scarcely been put out for recycling before this perfect new reality started to fray at the edges. At the start of his presidency, polls showed 60 per cent approved, only 20 per cent disapproval. Now another 10 per cent have come in from the sidelines to disapprove, and the peak of nearly 65 per cent approval in late February has subsided back to 60 per cent. In mid-March, Obama’s Gallop poll approval showed him slightly above George W Bush’s rating at the same point of his presidency, with disapproval ratings about the same.

We’re not talking full-blown buyer’s remorse, here. Just a little cognitive dissonance: that uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously; love the dude/does he know what he’s doing?

Unemployment is at 7 per cent, the deficit seems infinite, and heath care reform is back on the agenda - having already defeated several presidents (and one First Lady).

The presidential decisions most difficult to rationalise are the ones that are easiest to understand.

Only a week after inauguration, Senate confirmation hearings for the new administration ran into embarrassing roadblocks. It tuned out former Senator Tom Daschle, the nominee for Health czar, had enjoyed a fancy chauffeur-driven car and other perks, courtesy a company he’d informally lobbied for - without paying tax. Then Timothy Geithner, nominee for Treasury, had to confess he hadn’t paid all his taxes, either. This was a deep irony: the Treasury Secretary is in charge of the Internal Revenue Service, the US tax collection agency. Every taxpayer got the point: the top dog didn’t pay (why should I?).

The same story was repeated with other Obama nominees. It seemed as if there were no qualified Washington bureaucrats or high-level Democrat who actually paid the tax they owed. The joke on late-night TV ran: “how do you get a Democrat to pay taxes? Nominate them to Cabinet.”

Next came the mortgage bailout. Despite reassurances, this time the nagging little voice said: “Why should people who used their house as a piggy bank, or bought a big house they knew they couldn’t afford, be given a free ride?” Even the most kind-hearted Americans, and there are many, swallow hard at the thought of their tax dollars going to the greedy speculators living in the huge spec house around the corner.

Americans in colder states might notice, too, that it was mortgage defaults in the sunbelt states of California, Arizona, Nevada and Florida that sparked the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Through February and March, the nation seethed with rage towards bankers. People felt ripped-off.

Then the budget. Amazing to see the White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who trained as a ballet dancer, gracefully put his foot in his mouth and proclaim: “Never let a good crisis go to waste!”

According to Jonathan Rauch, in the National Journal: “Obama, like Bush, set out with an agenda of his own devising, only to have another, crisis-driven agenda imposed upon him. Like Bush, he chose not to decouple the two agendas but to portray them as inextricably linked and drive them both forward. Like Bush, he seemed to decide that the crisis made a handy sledgehammer.”

The Obama budget has induced widespread sticker shock. No one can compute the number of zeros in forward deficit estimates. One thing’s clear to the average taxpayer though: this approach wouldn’t cut it with the family budget.

Americans pretty much all agree on one thing: they have no respect for Congress, even though they may love their local member. One reason for this is ear-marking: the practice of including, in vast spending bills for central agencies, small amounts of funding for pet projects put forward by a given member’s loudest (and possibly richest) constituents. Before the election, Obama waged rhetorical war on earmarks, and yet they littered his very first domestic legislation, the stimulus bill written, at his surprising request, by the Congressional Democrats.

Obama’s fabled excellence as a communicator has also come under critical scrutiny: the word tone-deaf is emerging. Questioning his heavy use of the teleprompter is unfair - but there’s an obvious difference between the soaring rhetoric and heartwarming folksy touches of his prompted speeches and the rather cool, analytic unprompted response to a YouTube video question about unemployment during last week’s virtual Town Hall. The New York Times television critic described Obama’s appearance on Jay Leno’s The Tonight Show as “concerned and engaged, but intent on maintaining his professional distance and neutrality. At times, he may have seem a little too removed …”

Obama’s ironic sense of humour, while endearing, can land him in hot water, as with his self-deprecating Tonight Show gag about his bowling prowess: he compared it to the Special Olympics. Obama shouldn’t have said those words - or even thought them. He also has to be careful to remember that the campaign is over, and his former enemies are now his constituents and potential Congressional allies.

Also noticed - Obama’s frequent use of the rhetorical device "Straw Man": building up a ludicrously simplistic version of an opposing point of view in order to tear it down. This is not exactly the best way to encourage bipartisan co-operation. Euphemisms designed to rebrand former administration policies have started to crop up: “Overseas Contingency Operation” is the bland new name for the “so-called” Global War on Terror; his Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano called 9-11 a “man-caused disaster”.

These flaws in the integrity of Obama’s communication raise fears that he manipulates words in a “Through the Looking Glass” way, to make them mean what he chooses them to mean.

The disconnect between the popularity of Obama’s persona and his policies - his persona and these disconcerting communication glitches - explains why one Honeymoon Status Advisory Scale has settled at “Holding Hands: nice quiet romance, candlelight dinners, walks on the beach.” That’s number three on the scale: still cosy, but down from “Get a Room” and “Kissy-face”.

Facing the unknown, many Americans feel there’s little choice but to follow their leader, although not with the same optimistic fervour as those kids in the bookstore.