As Barack Obama completes a month in office, later this week, he will have to look back on a less smooth start than his enthusiastic support base would have hoped. Some key appointments have come unstuck, for one reason or other, showing up deficiencies in the presidential team’s screening process. The talk of a bipartisan approach has led, at one level, to disappointment among Obama fans about Republicans being picked for key jobs, and to broader disappointment among Democrats after the Republicans chose to not play ball on the bail-out package. On foreign policy, the new president has hit the ground running, with key trouble-spots having been put in charge of special envoys, and with Mr Holbrooke already done his first round of meetings in three countries.
Without doubt, the big ticket issue has been the $800 billion bailout package that Mr Obama has been able to get Congress to approve. That he has done so in less than four weeks is of course a matter of credit. What is not is the fact that it has left virtually everyone displeased in one way or the other. It is too obviously a case of legislators cashing in on the opportunity to get money for their favourite programmes, it is also manifestly seeking to serve too many objectives at the same time—which almost always makes for messy compromises all round. There is general recognition that the package does not have enough of a frontloaded stimulus, which is what might have been expected. The best that can be said is that President Obama and his team must be on a rapid learning curve.