THE TELEGRAPH: Barack Obama's only chance of a legacy is to stop thinking like Gordon Brown and start emulating Bill Clinton, argues Alex Singleton.
To make comparisons between Barack Obama and Gordon Brown might seem unfair. After all, Obama actually won his leadership position. He's also eloquent, a snappy dresser and comes across as rounded. But he has one fatal flaw - and it's the same as Gordon Brown's.
Mr Obama believes that society is a chessboard, and that the keys to the Oval Office give him the power to move the pawns on the board. But both in Britain and America, the characters on the board object to being treated like pawns in politicians' games. They will only tolerate so much meddling from above.
Brown's endless meddling destroyed Labour's electoral popularity, which Tony Blair had worked so hard to generate. Likewise, in America, Obama's statist interference is putting his chances of a second term in serious jeopardy. He confused a desire for change among the electorate with a desire for big government. Even his proposed land grab of the healthcare sector is unpopular, and Scott Brown's victory in Massachussetts has put it in peril.
It is too early to have expected Barack Obama to have brought change to America or the world, but the president is risking becoming a curious footnote in history - the first black president, but a president who failed to achieve his domestic reforms, who carried on George W. Bush's programme in Iraq, and who was thrown out after his first term. >>> Alex Singleton | Thursday, January 21, 2010
