At the start of May I argued that President Obama was as vulnerable to a challenger emerging as the seemingly ascendant George W H Bush was at the same time in 1991. This view was then out of kilter with the beltway view of Obama as a two term president. Subsequently the US has suffered an unprecedented credit downgrade, its economy has continued to struggle and grumbles about Obama, most recently due to his holidaying at a “millionaires’ playground”, have got louder.

Republicans are increasingly confident that Obama is Jimmy Carter. But the election will be a choice, not a referendum on Obama. They need a more convincing choice to win. As the early Republican pacesetters have not convinced, the stage remains set for a Republican Bill Clinton.

To date, tea party favourite Michelle Bachmann has probably done the best job of appealing to Republicans with misgivings, such as Romneycare and Mormonism, about the frontrunner, Mitt Romney. There may be enough such conservative voters for Romney to be defeated in January’s Iowa caucuses. The former Baptist pastor Mike Huckerbee won in this first state to vote in 2008.

God isn’t calling Huckerbee to run this time. However, God is said to have called Rick Santorum and Rick Perry, as well as Bachmann. Either they are suffering crossed wires or God’s mind is yet to be made up. God wouldn’t be the only one. The Republican race is fluid.

While Rick Perry’s backing for the three-time married Rudy Giuliani in 2008 and rumours about his own marriage are concerns for some religious voters, his leading of vast prayer meetings enables him to pitch to the religious right. That 40 percent of new US jobs since June 2009 have been created in Texas, where Perry is governor, also creates the basis – though other aspects of Texas’ economy undermine this – for appeal to those (i.e. everyone) with economic worries. A candidate able to challenge Romney for his strongest card, economic competence, and rival Bachmann for the religious right vote has a shout of being the Republican candidate.

There are various ways that this could play out.

First, Perry could crash. Karl Rove, widely seen as George W Bush’s puppet master, considers Perry beyond the pale. Perry has recently accused Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, of being “almost treasonous”, damned global warming “a hoax” and belittled evolution as “a theory that’s out there”. Perry could yet follow the likes of Donald Trump in sending shockwaves through the Republican contest only to fade away.

Second, Perry could, without actually winning it, have a more sustained impact on the race. While Romney’s already backed away from many positions that he held as governor of the traditionally Democratic state of Massachusetts, he would have to tack even further to the right under this scenario and so reduce his appeal to independents.

Third, Perry could take enough of Bachmann’s support from the right and make a sufficient dent in Romney’s claim to unrivalled economic competency to be the Republican candidate. The votes of independents are likely to determine the presidential election and Perry may be even less able to secure their support than a Romney who, as per my second scenario, has been forced to run to the right. This is probably why the White House is thought to favour a contest against Perry.

If Perry’s capacity to appeal to independents really is this limited, then the Republicans are right to look elsewhere – and they continue to encourage Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey, and Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin congressmen, to enter the race. Perry may be a “good-looking rascal”, according to Clinton himself, but he might demonstrate the impossibility of being a candidate able to take Republican votes off both Bachmann and Romney and also appeal to independents. This impossibility means that the Republicans either cannot have a candidate attractive to all their diverse wings or they cannot win in 2012.

All presidential elections come down to who offers the most compelling personification of the latest stage of the American dream and, given the resilience of American cultural and political conservatism, Perry could win by embodying something quite different from Obama. Undoubtedly, an Obama-Perry head-to-head would make epic political struggle of America’s long-running culture wars. It would be spectacular and vitriolic; re-energising Obama’s supporters after the sometimes stodgy prose of his time in office.

Those of us on the left in Europe will largely hope that the man who was our dream president in 2008 retains enough support amongst independents to remain in office. But we should also reflect that the real lesson of his time in office, for our continent, is that we must do more to build the world we want. Not rely on someone who may nominally be the most powerful person in the world and who may appear to share European values, but who, in neither respect, is so without significant constraints.

People make their own history, as Karl Marx knew and Angela Merkel and Barack Obama cannot deny, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. Over hundreds of years America has evolved to a fiercely divided, uncompromising polis wedded to a system demanding compromise. Over decades Europe has achieved monetary union. Thousands of years of history hang over its fiscal consummation, which is required to avoid collapse and further calamity. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

One of the ironies of Marx is that communism was supposedly inevitable, but his tombstone declares that the point is to change the world, not interpret it. What’s to change if history’s terminus is already determined? What was the point of agitating publications like the Communist Manifesto if we were all, in spite of ourselves, destined for communism?

Such publications imply that Marx himself may not have seen communism as quite the iron certainty that rigid interpretations of his writing suggest. But one of the divisions between Marxism and much of the rest of the left concerns the extent to which we are prisoners of history. Parties such Labour predicate themselves on an assumption that the institutions of advanced capitalist democracies can be moulded to serve socially just ends. Ed Miliband’s father, of course, like other Marxists, thought this naive.

Recent economic events seem to vindicate Ralph Miliband. Political leadership seems oxymoronic when our nominal leaders appear only witnesses to events that they can barely fathom, let alone command. (In the non-economic sphere, our Tuscan prime minister is similarly bemused by the revenge of the lumpenproletariat). Nothing has happened to undermine James Carville’s famous wish to come back as the bond market and intimidate everybody. It’s these markets that are in the box seat and our political leaders that are cowered.

What they demand are credible plans from governments to repay their creditors. This isn’t unreasonable. I expect you’d want to see credible repayment plans before you leant non-trivial amounts of money. The governments of the third and fourth largest economies in the eurozone, Italy and Spain, seem increasingly unable to produce such plans. The downgrade of the USA, though unjustified, speaks to a similar lack of confidence in America’s ability to manage its debts.

While events seem to lead towards the largest country in the world that still professes to be communist, China, being an ever more dominant geo-political force, the Marxists should not be too triumphant. The markets are, of course, as powerful as James Carville’s wildest dream and Ralph Miliband’s bleakest nightmare. But they do not remain beyond the capacity of political leaders to have them becalmed. That is if political leaders do what it says on their tin; lead.

This doesn’t mean interpreting opinion polls as immovable. Germany, for example, could swing behind the full steps required to save the euro if Merkel articulated them well enough. It means seeing your electorate as intelligent beings capable of being won over by the force of your argument and your actions. Merkel and Obama can still do this. But only if they stop being intimidated not only by the bond markets but also by opinion polls, their political opponents and their own inevitable failure to hold in their minds every relevant fact and figure.

As the Irish leader, Enda Kenny, has said the answer from Merkel, whether the question is bailouts or debt restructuring, is always no – until it is yes. We all know the big question hanging over all of this: will the single currency underwrite the debts of all of its members? These debts would be eminently manageable under such an arrangement; so long as the political will to enact such an arrangement can be found. It is for Merkel to find this will. If she cannot, then she should say so speedily. The longer she delays the worse the fallout when she confirms her inability to rise to her historic purpose.

In spite of the tea party and the fractious nature of US politics, things are more straight-forward for Obama. He has no unprecedented, continent-wide institution building project to contemplate as a matter of existential necessity. His outlook would suddenly look much rosier if he could only say yes, we did achieve growth rates in 2011 equal to the hardly spectacular rates of 2010.

Can the US really not grow at 2.8 per cent this year? Can unemployment really not be significantly reduced from the historic high of 9.2 per cent? While markets fret over the ability of governments to manage their debts, they are also increasingly worried that the US cannot do better on growth and unemployment. Surely if the social democratic faith in the power of government is justified then Obama can prove them wrong?

Merkel and Obama can rise to their challenges or we succumb to capitalism’s latest crisis. These crises will not, however, give way to something as pleasant as Marx envisaged communism to be. It will be something with much more of a Chinese flavour.

“I don’t want to talk to anyone about anything right now,” she exploded. With tears in her eyes, she retreated to a back room.

This was how the Democratic congresswoman Barbara Jordan, an eloquent contributor to the committee that voted to impeach President Nixon, reacted to a request for comment immediately after the vote. This request came from Michael Sandel, later a distinguished philosopher, then a newspaper intern.

Sandel recalled this encounter when the House began impeachment proceedings against President Clinton in 1998. While Barbara Jordan’s explosion demonstrated that even Democrats opposed to Nixon recognised the magnitude of impeachment, partisan passions against Clinton overrode any such recognition on the part of many Republicans 24 years later. 13 years hence, and the trends evidenced by the contrasting attitudes of Democrats to Nixon and Republicans to Clinton have hardly dissipated.

Many Republicans today would throw a tea party on the White House lawn, rather than discretely sob, if president Obama were impeached. This is in spite of the fact that impeachment should only properly occur when the constitutional system is seriously threatened. No matter that such a threat is inherently a matter of national tribulation; glee could be expected from those who seem consumed only by tribalism. The “Nazi Socialist Communist Muslim” would have got his comeuppance.

Watergate wrenched the scales from America’s eyes. But not so long prior to this, president Kennedy had private morals loose enough to make a French politician blush. These foibles weren’t widely known and he was revered, if for nothing else, simply for being the holder of the office that he held. Now these indiscretions are dramatised like an episode of keeping up with the Kardashians. The age of deference is gone and politicians are swept along on a tell-all celebrity tide.

While Obama retains a scholarly air, there is something rather tell-all about arriving in office with two autobiographies behind you. More significant than Obama’s willingness to tell-all, is the number of Americans for whom no matter how much he tells, his truths will never be accepted. And no matter how much he compromises, these compromises will never be reciprocated. He is someone they refuse to try to understand and who they are incapable of dealing with in good faith.

Lots of Tories felt the same way about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The difference is that these prime ministers never had to win a proportion of their opponents over to get their way. They had a majority in the Commons, and the Lords only ever resisted for so long. In contrast, Obama’s party has no majority in the House or filibuster majority in the Senate.

The political pendulum swings more violently in majoritarian systems such as ours. The checks and balances restrain it in the US. Part of the reason that I support a second chamber elected by PR in the UK is because a somewhat more democratic restraint on the executive would be to the benefit of our system. The US now appears, however, a case study in what can go wrong when this restraint is too sharp. With Republicans so trenchantly refusing to play ball with Obama, the pendulum rests not on a radical centre, a cross-dressed mix of the best of Democrat and Republican ideas, but upon dysfunction.

The checks and balances hardwire the necessity of reaching across the aisle into the American system. Yet Washington DC has become increasingly dominated by politicians as dogmatic as the hardest edged British whips. It’s not just a matter of not compromising with the enemy for many, but not compromising with reality either.

In reality managing US debt requires tax rises. In reality immigration reform must include pathways to citizenship for the 11m illegal immigrants slogging away in the US economy. In reality Obama’s health care reform looks remarkably like the proposals with which Republicans countered Hilary Clinton’s plans in the 1990s, not the road to serfdom. In reality prices have risen at the pumps but remain a fraction of European levels, environmentally unsustainable and only likely to continue to rise given finite supply. In reality Obama is a prisoner of the Republican refusal to accept reality. The debt ceiling fiasco isn’t an exception, but indicative of a deeper malaise.

The genius of the founding fathers was that in less partisan times radical centres could be found and that checks and balances restrained government before it did too much damage to the extraordinary entrepreneurial, industrious and proud American people. Powerful though these qualities remain on the part of the people, America faces new challenges that it won’t meet without improved public policy. Its checks and balances will prevent this so long as the civic decency and ability to see the national interest of Barbara Jordan is in so short a supply.

This is a conundrum that only those confident of the capacity of Europe and China to extend freedom globally can be sanguine about. In other words, it would be foolhardy not to be concerned.

The financial crisis was unprecedented and complex. But the left’s interpretation of it tended to be straight-forward. Banks and bankers were bad. Government and politicians were good. Government saved the banks from themselves and would stimulate economies. This enlarged role for government made a “progressive moment” inevitable. Yet government is now being scaled back and the left is out of power across Europe.

The left must move beyond its misconceptions to recover. While Labour’s plans to close the deficit concede limits to government’s size, George Osborne was much quicker than Gordon Brown to acknowledge such limits. The lesson of the debate on the deficit during and after the general election is that the left cannot be abashed by fiscal reality. It must confront it squarely. This is a lesson that Barack Obama might now reflect upon as debate in the US on the size of government moves to a similar place to that in the UK in the six months or so prior to the general election.

Reluctance to acknowledge limits on government’s size indicate how little the third way shifted the left’s gut instincts. The girth of government is still too readily taken as a virility symbol of leftism. This is in spite of government sometimes being a shackle upon the people the left exists to empower. Of course, government isn’t always so. Often it is a saviour and liberator. But to only see these aspects of government is not to see the full picture.

Jim Larkin, a pioneer of the Irish trade union movement, said: “The great only appear great because we are on our knees. Let us rise”. Government keeps people on their knees when it pays people to do nothing while others work ever harder, penalises people for its mistakes in miscalculating tax credits and loses personal data on a grand scale. From the rural payments agency, characterised by late payments, to the learning and skills council, with its abrupt termination of 144 college building contracts, the catalogue of failing public institutions is considerable. It hasn’t gone unnoticed. Almost half the voters in the south believe that public spending under Labour was largely wasted and did not improve services.

They may not be wholly justified in this view, but it forms an important part of the present context. Within which, the notion, taken as given by much of the left, that the public would welcome an expansion of government in a “progressive moment”, was always flawed. The failings of the public sector under the last government, whether perceived or genuine, rolled the pitch for the aggressive bowling with which Osborne has dismissed the “progressive moment”.

The MPs expenses scandal, by encouraging cynicism about public service, also assisted this pitch rolling. No appeal to a revitalised Keynesianism or other reasoned argument could hope to override the emotional resistance to an argument from politicians in the aftermath of this scandal, and the long-term decline in trust that the scandal compounded, that said “let us have more of your money and control of your lives”. Which is what the argument for a bigger role for government within the “progressive moment” amounted to.

This isn’t to say that the public didn’t feel, and do feel, disgusted by bankers and let down by banks. It is to say that the left needs to acknowledge that people feel similarly about politicians and government. And understand why people feel so and act upon this understanding.

These feelings about banks and government seem consistent with the argument of a Labour party discussion booklet, Small Man, Big World, written by Michael Young in 1949. This was, as his later collaborator Peter Willmott summarised, that the large institutions of modern society tended to ignore the interests of ordinary people, who suffered collectively as a result. Ordinary people see banks and government, for the most part, as such large institutions. Fred the shed and an MP’s subsidised moat are closer in the public mind than the political class might like to admit.

The left’s recovery in the UK depends upon Labour’s ability to disassociate ourselves with these large institutions and to become realigned with ordinary people. This emphasis should be central to our attitude to banking reform. It should also be so fundamental to our approach to government that Labour comes to be synonymous not with more government, as in the flawed “progressive moment” thesis, but with a wholly different kind of government. This requires, as Patrick Diamond argues, moving beyond the Westminster model to change the state and citizenship.

Young wrote his pamphlet four years after drafting the most celebrated manifesto in Labour’s history. However, the enactment of this manifesto made him concerned about the implications of a centralising bureaucratic state. The left’s failure to grasp this insight, even after 60 years, explains the faulty expectation of a “progressive moment”. Our ability to now run with this insight will determine the strength and speed of our recovery.

I recently saw a TV pundit – admittedly on Fox News, which I watch for perverse laughs – assert that Barack Obama will not win the next presidential election. Another pundit came back that he would, because the Republicans don’t have anyone to beat him. This is the prevailing establishment view. Andrew Neil recently tweeted: “A prediction you can hold me to: Obama will serve a second term”.

Obama’s position now is probably about as ascendant as that of George H W Bush at the same stage in 1991. Then Bill Clinton fatefully emerged. Few today deny that Obama has vulnerabilities. The existence of a Republican Clinton is more uncertain, however.

Mitt Romney has the kind of business background that helps in sustaining a claim to economic competence. This matters, particularly in the present economic climate. He may be the strongest Republican candidate and Obama may fear that further economic turbulence, as well as carrying its own risk, will lead Republicans to put aside their reservations about Romney-care and his religion to select him.

Romney is hardly Clintonesque, but Obama hasn’t always been so either. Can you imagine, for instance, Clinton being as remote as Obama seemed during the Gulf oil slick? James Carville blasted him for this. He has done better with recent tornados and, of course, the capture of Osama Bin Laden.

What kind of rocket would Donald Trump have fired at BP if he were then president? While his birther views diminish his limited credibility, his tough stances on China, oil producers and anyone else who is perceived to threaten immediate American economic interests both push at a promising political marketplace and position him as a robust operator who would have had no compunction about getting tough with the likes BP.

Trump’s colourful private life means that he has bridges to build with the religious right if he is to secure the Republican nomination. That said, the economic climate is such that the Republican candidate may end up being someone closer to the party’s business-friendly tradition, rather than someone, like Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee, enamoured by the religious right.

A Republican Clinton – a candidate capable of beating Obama – would need to pacify the religious right enough to secure the Republican nomination without so pandering to them as to infuriate the independent voters who will decide the presidential election. They would also trade on Obama’s vulnerabilities: lack of empathy; having come to embody the Washington establishment that he once ran against; a tentative economic recovery; indecisiveness; and a reluctance to assert American leadership and authority.

“America must lead”, said John McCain recently on Libya. Obama’s multilateralism – insistent, for example, upon unambiguous UN support for intervention in Libya – and realism about gas prices – “there is no silver bullet to address rising gas prices in the short term” – may be to European tastes. But Trump’s line may be closer to the views of Americans irate at the gas pumps and war weary: “Either I’d go in (to Libya) and take the oil or I don’t go in at all”.

If the fundamentally un-presidential Trump can get closer than any other Republican to hitting the soft spot of Americans, then Obama is likely to serve a second term. Nonetheless, Obama should act as if the Republicans were possessed of the kind of Clinton figure who would be able to consistently hit these spots.

This person might be Tim Pawlenty. While he probably isn’t, the former Minnesota governor may end up as the GOP nomination by having fewer major weaknesses than anyone else. Jon Huntsman and Mitch Daniels are also both intriguing figures, who might be capable of winning a Republican race that no one is yet dominating.

Whether or not any of these candidates fulfils their potential, the point is that Obama has big enough flaws that he should be compensating for them, irrespective of whether the other side has yet found the candidate to exploit them. Such a Republican could yet materialise and even if they don’t (as seems most likely), this approach would produce the biggest possible Obama win.

Which means rejecting any inclination towards a safety-first, steady-as-she-goes strategy. It calls for a sufficient emotional connection to embody the latest manifestation of the American dream. Winning presidential candidates always make it morning again in America – except that it has long been winter in America for many. The annual incomes of the bottom 90 per cent of US families have been essentially flat since around the time Gil Scott Heron recorded that song in the early 1970s.

Hard working families felt that Clinton was on their side. His secretary of labour, Robert Reich, now argues for putting “money into the pockets of average working families. Not until they start spending again big time will companies begin to hire again big time”. Obama should boldly lead the debate on national debt by placing tax reforms that would ease the squeeze and power economic recovery at the centre of his response.

Let’s begin with the challenge posed to America’s elites by E. J. Dionne Jr in the Washington Post:

“A funny thing happened to the American ruling class: It stopped being concerned with the health of society as a whole and became almost entirely obsessed with money … The ruling class now devotes itself in large part to utterly self-involved lobbying. Its main passion has been to slash taxation on the wealthy, particularly on the financial class that has gained the most over the past 20 years. By winning much lower tax rates on capital gains and dividends, it’s done a heck of a job … And you wonder where the deficit came from. If the ruling class were as worried about the deficit as it claims to be, it would accept that the wealthiest people in society have a duty to pony up more for the very government whose police power and military protect them, their property and their wealth … Where are those who will now take up this banner?”

The answer, it would seem, is resident in the White House but on the road. The Post also reports:

“President Obama will hit the road this week and forcibly deliver his message that a combination of spending cuts and tax hikes on the rich is necessary to rein in the nation’s rocketing debt — a high-stakes effort to rally public support ahead of a series of contentious budget battles in Congress. From Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale to Facebook’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, Obama will make a series of campaign-style stops in an effort to block a Republican plan that would reduce the deficit by dramatically changing Medicare and reducing spending on education and other social programs.”

I don’t think this strategy is really such a big risk for two reasons.

First, the Republican plan from Paul Ryan is absurd. The more it is debated the less credible it will appear. As Robert J. Samuelson notes:

“He achieves big savings by assuming deep cuts to most of the federal government beyond Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Ultimately, it would shrink to almost nothing. That’s defense, food stamps, highways, federal courts, basic research . . . and much more.”

Second, the polling evidence suggests that the principles behind Obama’s approach to deficit closure are popular. The Post reports:

“Polls show that Obama has work to do on the deficit but that many Americans agree with his broad approach. In a Washington Post-ABC News poll in mid-March, 55 percent of respondents disapproved of his handling on the issue, with 39 percent approving. But, playing to Obama’s advantage, only about a third of Americans prefer a “cut only” approach to the deficit; nearly two in three say spending cuts and tax increases should be included.”

So in taking up the challenge set by Dionne Jr Obama is providing the tax element that two thirds of Americans want to see. However, Samuelson is right to point out that this element on its own is not enough:

“We won’t make much progress until (a) Democrats concede that spending control requires genuine cuts in Social Security and Medicare, which now total $1.3 trillion annually and represent 35 percent of federal outlays; and (b) Republicans acknowledge that, even after significant spending cuts, tax increases will be needed to balance the budget. Last week, there was little sign of either. President Obama rebuffed Social Security and Medicare cuts. Most Republicans held fast on taxes.”

The evident impracticality of the Ryan plan means that Obama can convincingly win this key debate. But to do so he has to be prepared to do what Gordon Brown was so unwilling to do six months or so out from the general election: talk about cuts.

Brown’s unwillingness to do this meant that the economic debate in the general election reduced to a debate about whether or not to begin deficit reduction in 2010 (Labour said “no”; the Tories said “yes”; and the Lib Dems said “no” in the campaign and “yes” in government). A wider debate about the deficit would have better suited Labour. It was apparent by the end of 2009 that significant cuts over the next parliament would be necessary. Gordon Brown could have presented himself as a sensitive surgeon to the public services Labour had cultivated, in contrast to the brutal destroyer that David Cameron would amount to (and is now proving to be).

The Post reports:

“The Treasury Department has concluded that the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling will be breached next month and will have to be raised by early July. Republicans want legislation to reduce government spending to be part of the vote to raise the debt limit; the Obama administration has said that further deficit reduction is needed but that the issues should not be joined.”

I wonder whether there is a case for Obama calling the bluff of Republicans on this and going where Brown feared to tread. By being prepared to introduce such legislation Obama would close off the Republican attack that he has no plan for closing the deficit. Once this attack is closed then scrutiny will increasingly fall upon the inadequate Ryan plan and support for the mix of tax increases and spending cuts proposed by Obama will translate into support for the President. Taking the bull by the horns in this way is the stuff of the radical centre and bold leadership. This translates into the colour purple on both sides of the Atlantic.

“When race came to the fore in his presidential campaign, in the form of the Jeremiah Wright scandal, he responded brilliantly, with a fine unifying speech that challenged the country to be calm, sober and enlightened. The mosque debate was a moment for a speech of that kind.

“Whether or not he made the case for the project to go ahead – as, on balance, I think he should – he could have reminded the country of its common purposes, he could have sought to unify, he could have insisted on tolerance and understanding on both sides. That was the Barack Obama the country elected. Where did he go?”

This is surely a question to ponder as we reflect upon the essential features of the Cordoba Centre as Charlie Brooker described them in the Guardian yesterday:

“When I heard about it – in passing, in a soundbite – I figured it was a US example of the sort of inanely confrontational fantasy scheme Anjem Choudary might issue a press release about if he fancied winding up the tabloids for the 900th time this year. I was wrong. The “Ground Zero mosque” is a genuine proposal, but it’s slightly less provocative than its critics’ nickname makes it sound. For one thing, it’s not at Ground Zero. Also, it isn’t a mosque.

“Wait, it gets duller. It’s not being built by extremists either. Cordoba House, as it’s known, is a proposed Islamic cultural centre, which, in addition to a prayer room, will include a basketball court, restaurant, and swimming pool. Its aim is to improve inter-faith relations. It’ll probably also have comfy chairs and people who smile at you when you walk in, the monsters.”

What?

That is surely the sound of a President splitting hairs to such an extent as to abdicate leadership. While the Economist’s chronicling of the American left’s despondency with Barack Obama says as much about the lack of backbone and realism on the part of the American left as it does about Obama, this backbone would be significantly fortified by genuine leadership from Obama. 

He seemed to show this leadership when he initially appeared to endorse the plans for the Cordoba Centre in NYC with words which Alex Massie accurately described as his ”best words in god knows how long”. Yet he quickly rowed back from this act of principled leadership with the words I quoted at the start of this blog.

The likes of Harry Reid and Howard Dean may have shamefully betrayed the best American instincts in voicing opposition to the Centre. But Obama should be bigger and better than that.

If ‘yes, we can’ means anything it should mean, at least, ’yes, we can do things in a different way from right-wing Republicans’. I’ve consistently argued that Obama should reach across the aisle to form a radical centre with reform-minded Republicans and these Republicans have consistently proved themselves conspicuous by their non-existence. Obama’s instinct is invariably to seek compromise and to split the difference and such instincts on the part of the President are a precondition of America finding a radical centre. But non-Democrats being willing to play ball with Obama is also a precondition of a radical centre and this precondition has not been satisfied. The right response to this is not equivocation but for the President to draw some lines in the sand.

And a line in the sand should have been drawn over the Cordoba Centre.

Obama should have been clear that the aim of Al-Qaeda is to divide Americans against Americans; to make American Muslims be Muslims first and Americans second. It is astonishing that the likes of Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin have opposed the Centre with logic – I use the term loosely – consistent with that of Al-Qaeda. America, obviously, needs to rise above such logic and demonstrate that it embodies and will continue to embody virtues of plurality, tolerance and diversity. This is why the Cordoba Centre matters. If it doesn’t go ahead, America will have compromised on and been seen to have compromised on its most precious values.

America is a beautiful idea as much as it is a wonderful country. Just as Al-Qaeda is an appalling idea as much as it is an organised terrorist network. If Obama can’t spell out and stand his ground on the relevance of the Cordoba Centre to this, he’ll only have himself to blame if the Democrats find themselves lacking in activists in November. Ok, some Republicans will be even less likely to his friend but they don’t want to his friend anyways and Obama should stop pretending that they do. Instead, he should concentrate, like Harvey Milk said, on giving his supporters some hope. This doesn’t mean stopping being pragmatic; stopping cutting deals with Congress where they have to be cut, as they had to be on health care.

But it does mean clearly and unambiguously articulating your most important beliefs, even if these beliefs may not be shared by everyone. In fact, it is even more important when they are not shared by everyone. Obama seemed to promise all things to all people when he became President, which always made his presidency a hostage to fortune, but the very least that we could expect him to be was more sane and humane than the administration that went before him and Republicans of that vintage. This demands that he sees the Cordoba Centre for what it is – everything that is best about America – and says so very loudly and clearly. Everyone who cares about all that is best about America should hope that he is capable of this.