Great expectations | 29 October 2011

‘We chose to believe things that could not be true,’ says Velma Hart, the American finance officer who famously confronted President Obama at a town hall meeting in Washington DC and told him straight that she was tired of constantly having to defend him against his former supporters among the middle classes. She voted for Obama, believing that with him as President real change was possible in America, but since then she has become less sure of his ability to make any difference. Having just lost her job, her fears for the future have been realised. Would she vote for Obama again?

Hart was talking to Gary Younge, who reported on the Obama election campaign for the Guardian. He’s been wondering what happened to all that enthusiasm, all that belief, all that hope, and in the second of his two-part series Performance Notes on a Presidency on Sunday (produced by Peggy Sutton) he puzzled through the past couple of years, which have seen Obama’s popularity slide, his effectiveness as President dwindle. The cool intellectual has become a cold thinker, paralysed by analysis and out-of-touch with his voters. How has this happened? Will Obama be re-elected next year?

‘Right now, we’re not listening,’ explained one American commentator. ‘Eloquence only gets you so far.’ Obama’s agenda once he was in the White House was based on the assumption that the recession was not so bad, that it was not going to get worse. But actually it’s become deeper, gone on longer than any of the experts predicted, turned into the worst economic mess since the Great Depression of the 1930s. ‘He can’t perform his way out of this.’

Drew Westen, a psychologist who wrote a book, The Political Brain, which seeks to work out why people vote as they do, says Obama is too calm, too rational.