Obama honeymoon still hearts and roses?

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.