re: #586 SpaceJesus

I won’t disown Obama - yet
Posted By: Daniel Hannan at Mar 22, 2009

Several of you are pestering me to turn against Barack Obama. “C’mon, Tory boy”, you cry, “still think he’s the messiah?”

There’s no point in repeating that my support for the man was faute-de-mieux, that I strongly supported GOP Congressional candidates and that, far from believing Obama was the messiah, I kept citing the millenarianism of his supporters as one of the main arguments against him. This is a blog, after all, and blogs allow no shades of gray. Once I had declared for him, qualified as my declaration was, I became an “Obamaniac” - which attitude, by the way, neatly demonstrates the with-us-or-against-us bellicosity that has put so many Republicans off their party.

So, have I changed my mind? Well, I won’t deny that Obama has done plenty of irritating things, ranging from the idiotic stimulus package to the way he dissed the Prime Minister (yes, I know the man’s a clot, Mr President, but he’s our clot; and, tired as you may have been, I suspect the Royal Marines in their Forward Operating Bases in Helmand, fighting a war that few of your allies will touch, are pretty drowsy too).

On the other hand, the US remains more popular than it has been for years, and Obama’s own approval ratings, though fallen, are well above the vote he received in November.

The only fair answer I can give is that it’s too early to say. As Andrew Sullivan puts it in today’s Sunday Times:

In an age of 24-hour news channels, millions of blogs and columnists vying to stay above the bloggerrhoeic tide, there is a real urge to make a clear and instant judgment.

I’m not going to do it, because, two months after a president has taken office in the middle of a global financial and economic crisis, as he grapples with two unending wars and a battered constitution, the whole idea of a definitive judgment is loopy. It’s also likely to be wrong. If you had judged the last Bush administration at this point, you would have said it was much better than expected.

I can’t put it better any better than that. Sorry, guys: you’ll have to come back and ask me in few months’ time.