My relief that the gilt has worn off the presidency

The clowns at the top of the bill at the UN General Assembly vaudeville show, Iran's Ahmadinejad and Libya's Gaddafi, did President Obama a bit of a favour. Their ravings highlight what a cool and rational fellow the new president of the United States is, making his debut at the United Nations yesterday and today hosting the G20 industrial leaders in Pittsburgh.

If intellect, charm and goodwill were all that counted, his leadership would persuade the recalcitrant and the G20 would wrap up with unanimous endorsement on stimulating economies, nipping protectionism in the bud, cutting back sharply on carbon gases and taking a big stick to "the malefactors of great wealth" (as Theodore Roosevelt put it in the financial panic of 1907).

We know, don't we, that it won't happen, but the trouble is that Obama's eloquence and dedication arouse expectations that something like it might.

He has put the challenge to the big powers with steely courtesy: you've all moaned about the way America went it alone in the Bush-bashing years, now we're suggesting you might put your money where your mouth is and join in a great global partnership of mutual amity.

Alas, all the smart commentators are pointing out that some of the fizz has gone out of the euphoria of his first rock-star entry on the world stage — just as it has back home. His poll ratings, in the sixties six months ago, have bumped along the low fifties and this week were at 51 per cent approval; the proportion of voters saying the country is on the wrong track is at 53 per cent — glittering figures by comparison with the waning Bush years but clearly marking the end of the honeymoon.

Obama has had a horrible summer. It was nice on the beach with Michelle and the kids in Martha's Vineyard but while the White House and the Democrats coasted on a variety of putative health reform bills, the Republican Right, given up for dead, sprang vengefully back like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, with a concerted campaign to fill the summer vacuum.

The eruptions of anti-government populist outrage in town hall "tea party" meetings were the first rumbles of thunder, then came the August storm with many tens of thousands from all over the country clogging the streets around the Capitol vehemently protesting against what Big Brother Obama was doing to America.

They are not just stirred up by fears that Obama's health care revolution means he wants to take away their private insurance and tax them to subsidise illegal immigrants (it's not true about the illegals, though it's widely believed). The tea party crowds hate the thought that the country is in hock to the Chinese, who are financing the record $1.5 trillion federal deficit — a runaway gravy train heading for the most almighty crash. They've forgotten that Bush turned a huge Clinton surplus into a bigger deficit in record time.

Ex-President Jimmy Carter, who hasn't met a paranoia he doesn't want to adopt, has taken to the podium to explain the hubbub as racism: "There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president." Obama gave the best comment on that fatuity. " I was black before I was elected president." There were no doubt unreconstructed racists in the "tea party crowds", but they'd have been venting in the same way if Hillary Clinton were president because they've lost homes, jobs, college, health coverage through no fault of their own.

Michael Moore's new movie mockingly entitled Capitalism: A Love Story will be denounced on the Right as subversion, but he's filmed an interview with a worker in a home-supplies factory who gives voice to millions of the disappointed. His factory is closing, he notes, because a banker made a bad business deal: "I don't make deals. I make doors and windows."

It's surprising, in fact, how slow it has been for Americans to show the rage among millions about losing a job while the bankers, who created the mess, don't lose their bonuses. The Obama administration would have been wiser to tackle financial reform sooner (especially since some in the administration had a hand in the reckless liberation of the shadow banking system and mortgages for anyone who asked).

A week ago Obama rallied to give a brilliant speech defending his health reform (the one where the South Carolina congressman helped out by yelling "Lie!"). It produced an uptick in support, but again the timing is strangely off.

The president should have given that lead at the very start. By the time he spoke, the 80 per cent approval for health reform he espoused in principle had evaporated to under 50 cent this week.

He then felt he had, uniquely, to monopolise the Sunday morning talk shows, appearing on all five. One in time might have saved five. As it is, he is over-exposed to the point that people will switch off and there's a feeling we'd be better off if he applied himself, grittily and diligently, to one issue at a time. In that sense, he is wasting an asset. Everyone who has been in meetings with him says he has an extraordinarily open mind, a facility for finding out what people really think and a gift for distilling the true essence.

In a curious way, it is a good thing that a little of the gilt has worn off the Obama presidency. It is unfair that he inherited a financial system in crisis, an automobile industry on the point of collapse, an unfinished war he had opposed, Osama bin Laden still at large, Iran moving inexorably towards acquiring missiles, North Korea's leader on the rampage, the aftermath of the Gaza war dimming prospects of a Middle East settlement.

His exceptional speeches, the huge sense of relief and excitement that the years of "in your face" diplomacy of the Bush administration were over, made us think Obama would come in and, hey presto, everything would be different. Now there's a more sensible appreciation of the limits of power but it is accompanied by an appreciation that will grow of the quieter advances of his administration — the more enlightened attitude to science, notably stem cell research, the revocation of reactionary environmental orders, a significant assault on improving public education, greater openness in government.

I believe we will see the momentum build for success in domestic policy and even now, in the winter of discontent, Obama has made a better start than either of the Demcratic superstars Bill Clinton and Jack Kennedy.

Harold Evans's autobiography, My Paper Chase, has just been published by Little, Brown.