Paul Holmes: A president under attack

Despite his difficulties, President Barack Obama still rates highly as a tremendous communicator. US News has just asked Americans in a poll: who do you think has been the greatest modern presidential communicator, dating back to Franklin Roosevelt?

Ronald Reagan still came in as the Great Communicator, followed by John F. Kennedy. He was followed by Obama, just one percentage point ahead of Bill Clinton. But Reagan, Kennedy and Clinton were not only communicators - they were also operators. And the ability to operate effectively is the growing question about Obama.

This week the President was in a series of hell-raising speeches around the United States, damning American health insurers and defending his proposed health reforms. Obama believes the reforms have to happen now because this is a now-or-never opportunity.

The Republicans oppose it. The reform is so dramatic Americans know both sides will have to buy into it for such a package to have any long-term traction.

In the next week or so Obama might be able to sneak the bill through the House of Representatives but it will then return to the Senate where the Democrats are one senator short of being able to prevent a Republican filibuster.

Obama seems almost to have staked his presidency on this reform. He has to win. But any day now a massive media campaign by a group of wealthy businesses, including the health insurance industry, will launch a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign denouncing Obama's plans.

And meanwhile, America is being sucked dry by massive commitments to two theatres of gruelling war, one of which is considered to have been disastrous (Iraq) and the other pretty well-rated as mired down (Afghanistan).

Young men have died in their thousands, and many more are coming home wounded or maimed. As well as that, just under 10 per cent of Americans are unemployed and millions more work part time. In Obama's Chicago, unemployment among African-Americans may be as high as 30 per cent.

In London's Daily Telegraph this week, British journalist Simon Heffer paints a picture of America in a desperate state. Large areas of the north and the eastern seaboard are "industrial wastelands". Detroit is slowly being abandoned. Newark and Baltimore "now have drug dealing as their principal commercial activity".

We have this passionate, bloody-minded health reform face-off, with both sides not yielding more than an inch or two, where the Republicans see it as a chance to do Obama in.

We have multimillion-dollar business groups about to dump on Obama. We have an electorate that does not know whether Obama's reforms will cost more or less than health care costs now, and many are already in a state of confused, unemployed misery.

But the consternation among the pundits is why Obama has not been able to deliver the deals that would have got his health plans through. He was elected with such enormous promise. America, ever able to reinvent itself, had done the impossible - it had elected an African American to the presidency.

Obama seemed then, as Heffer also remarks, to have been a man who could "walk on water". Looking back, expectations were high that he could achieve anything. He was a first-term Senator, after all. Before that he was a "community organiser".

But he took on health reform, the same nasty area that tripped up Bill Clinton in his first year. To take on health reform is to take on the awesome might of the entrenched and wealthy American healthcare industry and its insurers. And while Obama is brilliant at the set-piece speech, he has not demonstrated the crucial presidential ability to pull deals together behind closed doors.

But Congress is still, nevertheless, passing legislation allocating billions of dollars in tax breaks for businesses hiring new staff for the financing of construction projects. The Senate is working on a bill to allocate US$150 billion for similar purposes.

Which leads Obama into another dangerous area. He is accused now by his enemies of introducing socialism into the US. And here, his massive problem is the power of Fox News. It out rates the moderate old nanny CNN by four to one. It has superb hosts, whatever you think of its political leanings. It uses superb commentators. And all of them are anti-Democrat, anti-Obama to a core.

There is the relentlessly anti-Obama Bill O'Reilly, probably the most effective television news host anywhere today. There is Sean Hannity, a bit of a bloke, also relentless and a brutal thug. And there is the strange lecturer, the reformed alcoholic, the man who cries tears of passion and writes things on a blackboard. Glenn Beck, who has just become the most popular television news host in the United States.

But CNN's problem is Obama's problem. How to beat Fox? And how to avoid being defeated by Fox? Obama has, of course, done it before, in the 2008 presidential campaign. But now Obama is into the gruelling meat of an actual presidency. And 24 hours a day, within the United States and overseas, Fox pours out its damnation of him and everything he is trying to do.

With the healthcare reforms dividing the Congress and the Democratic Party, Fox lays it in. Obama's health care reforms are nonsense! What's more, the United States is now indoctrinating its children! How Fox works that one out, I've no idea. Every country indoctrinates its children.

Voting public money to the tune of billions for construction projects and work schemes is wrong! It is not the American way, cries Fox.

It seems strange, does it not, that at the time America elects a historic figure with a clear mandate for change, a brilliant communicator, the most popular American news channel should be the one that pours out a torrent of indignant conservatism. Murdoch must be very grumpy these days.

In the meantime, with many Americans pondering whether their nation, the giant of the 20th century, may be in permanent decline, having taken the entire financial world down with them, China potters happily onwards and upwards and with India, I noticed, signed up to Copenhagen this week.

I HOPE YOU enjoy this column. Next week I am coming out with a book, Holmes at Large, a selection of what I hope are my more solid attempts at column-writing. The book was this newspaper's idea.

At first I was sceptical anyone would want to read such a collection. But they sent me the 85 or 90 I've written and I found a good number of them stack up.

There have been occasions when I have been close to controversial events and had the advantage of examining them in proximity. And there have been times, too, when my family has been part of the news. They are all in there, the painful ones, the thoughtful ones and the happy ones.