Paul Thomas: Bad, but not that bad

Even before the Republican victory in this week's Massachusetts Senate race, the think-pieces reflecting on Barack Obama's first year in office were adopting the patronising yet injured tone of a school report: "A disappointing year. We had high hopes for young Barack, but he has failed to live up to expectations. Too easily distracted; must try harder."

After the Democrats' loss of the seat held by the late Ted Kennedy for 47 years, the tone became downright dismissive. Some of those with an axe to grind could barely restrain themselves from writing Obama's political obituary.

One right-wing pundit called the Massachusetts result "nothing short of a revolution". Even allowing for the routine misuse and abuse of the word "revolution", this is a spectacularly fatuous statement. It does, however, reflect the triumphalism now taking hold among American conservatives, the growing belief that Obama is destined to be Jimmy Carter Mark 2: an ineffectual single-term president whose legacy will be to put a chastened electorate off the idea of a Democrat in the White House for a long time.

Propaganda and wishful thinking aside, the eagerness to extrapolate in such definitive terms from the outcome of a by-election is symptomatic of the media's compulsion to rush to judgment. Whatever they teach in journalism schools these days, it doesn't include the time-honoured principle that a week is a long time in politics.

That said, there's a limit to how much gloss Obama and his supporters can apply to this humiliation. He may not have crashed and burned, but he's certainly flying lower and wobblier these days.

To some extent this is entirely predictable; so predictable in fact that I managed to predict it. After Obama's inauguration I wrote: "Every time he makes a decision he'll disappoint some and infuriate others, and a layer of support will peel away like an onion skin. Some of his media boosters will defect, either because they feel their flattery hasn't been repaid in kind, or because Obama has failed to live up to the impossibly high standards they've set for him, or because, having built him up, they decide it's time to cut him down to size."

While some of his opponents have portrayed him as being to the left of Mao Zedong, it's arguable that his core support is eroding because he's not left-wing enough. While conservatives were quick to interpret the Massachusetts result as a vote against health-care reform, post-election polls showed that a significant number of Democrats either didn't vote or voted Republican in protest at what they see as the timid and hopelessly compromised health-care scheme now before the Senate.

And you'd have to assume that some of those who voted for Obama because they opposed George W. Bush's military interventions now blame him for the fact that American troops are still in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Having taken office promising a bipartisan approach and perhaps under the illusion that his charm, intellect and reasonableness would prove irresistible, Obama has been put on the back foot by congressional obstructionism and smear campaigns in the wider political arena. Americans have always played hardball, but this president has been the target of unscrupulous attacks on his legitimacy, sometimes with the nod and wink collusion of office-holding Republicans.

Obama also had the misfortune to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, a silly and embarrassing decision which bolstered the right's critique of his foreign policy: that he's more concerned with winning the international community's approval than standing up for America's interests.

So how bad is bad? The first thing to be said is that recent two-term presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Bush Junior all went through similarly rough patches.

The second is that it's still early days. Even assuming that Obama spends the final year of his term running for re-election, he still has two years in which to fashion a credible record and regain lost support. One imagines he and his team will move heaven and earth to ensure that they go into the 2012 election with health-care reform off the agenda one way or the other, withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq well under way, and the economic indicators, particularly unemployment, moving - and being seen to be moving - in a positive direction.

Put like that it sounds straightforward, but he'll need luck in the timing of economic recovery.

A popular uprising leading to regime change in Iran would help, as would the Republicans choosing a candidate who makes hard-line conservatives go weak at the knees but spooks moderates and scares the hell out of those fickle supporters who spoilt his anniversary.