There comes a point when you can’t take any more of a good thing.

Specifically, there comes a point when you can’t absorb any more overblown rhetoric about something that can never live up to its billing.

Barack Obama’s coming Presidency is like that.

Obamamania has hit a tipping point when it’s just beginning to shapeshift into its opposite. Ominously, we’re starting to feel jaded by the hype. We know it can’t possibly all be true. We’re aware that some people are talking through their hats bigtime.

Let’s face it, one man can’t possibly be … Barack Obama. The burden would be too great.

The achievement so far — that of a god not a man with smelly feet who snores (Michelle Obama’s words, not mine) — has happened on the back of yet another phenomenal bubble.

We should pity the man. Does he know what he has taken on? Has he the self-knowledge to realize that the greater part of the world’s population is projecting its desires and fantasies onto his frail shoulders?

My opinion is that a measure of competent administration, while keeping his country out of more wars, and gradually purging the vast indebtedness of the nation without bringing it to a shuddering halt, will be the very best he can hope for. Even that short list may not easily be achieveable under current conditions.

It would be a bravura performance if accomplished, given Obama’s political and economic inheritance from the previous administration. It would also deeply disappoint and disillusion two-thirds of the world’s population. As a realist where politicians are concerned, I would regard those simple goals achieved as close to heroic.

The future will be built around carefully-crafted technical solutions to almost unresolvable problems across the board. A truly intelligent President will know that like a bad case of fever, the cure must be to let it run its course, especially given the massive interventions that have already occurred.

The danger for Obama is that expectations are running so high that he will feel impelled to make grand gestures both at home and abroad. Such gestures are never neutral in their effects, though. They are often increasingly destructive well before the desired outcome has had time to make itself felt.

In terms of foreign policy decisions, reversals of current positions offer more hope than new, grandiose pronouncements.

Reversing Clinton’s sliding of NATO right up to Russia’s borders would be a good start. An offer of non-deployment of the “Star Wars” rocket shield to Poland in return for a Russian guarantee of the integrity of its neighbours’ territory, would probably reduce the tense standoff.

NATO is a busted flush, in any case, with Continental Europe refusing to contribute to its burdens.

At home, reducing government’s stake in the U.S. mortgage market, and an unpicking of Bill Clinton’s clumsy attempts to ensure “All must have prizes,” in the shape of houses they could never afford, would be a smart move, but I fear an unpopular one.

As for the last Bush to occupy the White House, Barack Obama will not need me to advise him on areas of policy reversal.

It won’t be spectacular. The times don’t call for that. But President Obama must rein in the “can-do, must-do” pressures from his wilder brethren who crave a Messiah in the White House.

Again, it won’t be easy, and disappointment will result. However, nothing will benefit his country more than a term or two of sobersides, thoughtful governance, stripped of declamatory passions and meaningless promises.

The phrase, “Mission accomplished,” must never pass his lips.

John Evans

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