A poll shows how the US president has disappointed the hopes of many worldwide. Americans, though, have their own issues
We have a lot of truisms in American politics, and some of them are even true – at least some of the time. "All politics is local," the late Tip O'Neill, veteran speaker of the House of Representatives, famously said. So I suspect that Tip, wherever he now presides, wouldn't set much store by the latest headline from the Pew Global Research Center revealing that President Obama's global reputation has slipped considerably in the three years since he took office, won the Nobel peace prize and kept the United States from sinking into a depression.
Why has this happened? And what does it say about his prospects for re-election?
"What have you done for me lately?" Long before it became a hit for Janet Jackson, this was the catchphrase of Fiorello LaGuardia, three-term mayor of New York, an Italian-Jewish-socialist-Republican who remains the greatest local politician in American history and, as one of his biographers put it, "a balanced ticket all by himself". Obama shares some of LaGuardia's crossover appeal, but he is also now burdened with a record, and that record gives ample cause for disillusion.
The inspirational speaker who promised the Muslim world a new beginning in Cairo in 2009 is now the president who has yielded so much ground to Bibi Netanyahu, he ought to have a triangular-shaped sign on his backside. The Socratic figure who took America to school on race and history in Philadelphia in 2008 is now the arbiter of a "kill list" – a phrase that probably says more than any other about the great falling-off in the president's moral authority. (In Pakistan, where presidentially-approved drone strikes are killing their inevitable share of bystanders, along with America's enemies, they know very well what Obama has done for them lately – and they don't like it very much.) And the candidate who promised, time and again, to close Guantánamo Bay is the president who has repeatedly failed to keep that promise.
Then, there's the economy, stupid. Here, Obama's international reviews are mixed. That the Chinese don't like him much – in fact, Chinese confidence in Obama is down 24% from 2009, a bigger drop than anywhere else in the world – is not entirely to his discredit. Given how many US assets they now own, the Chinese attitude is partly that of any landlord toward an unruly tenant. But some of it doubtless derives from the unwelcome encouragement, in words if not in deeds, that Obama continues to give to human rights campaigners in countries the United States doesn't need to buy oil from or base troops in. Europe remains pretty confident in Obama – 80% of you are still drinking the KoolAid – and surprisingly (60%) favorable toward the US. But then, if you look at how George Osborne's austerity-led growth plan is working out in the UK, maybe the hopey-changey thing doesn't look so bad.
The phrase "American exceptionalism" comes from a debate between Joseph Stalin and American Communists in the 1920s. But the belief that our country is somehow different from other nations is at least as old as the Puritan John Winthrop's 1630 sermon to the Massachusetts Bay colonists. Which makes it more than a century older than any sign of "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind". Yet, the world's opinion of America, and America's president, does matter. Obama may deserve little credit for the Arab spring, but the response to his Cairo speech showed how much influence a US president can have when he speaks what people know to be the truth.
Still, most of us who drank the KoolAid last time are warier now. For some of us, it was the crippled compromise of Obamacare, and the failure to preserve even the possibility of a real national health service. For others, it was the way the Bush administration's battering of civil liberties has been sustained, rather than repudiated, by his successor. Not to mention his love-in with Wall Street. Or the eagerness with which the president has embraced his role as murderer-in-chief, not just regarding the unlamentable Bin Laden, but in his grim insistence on personally approving every targeted killing.
Does all this disillusion – yours, mine, theirs – say anything about his electoral chances? Probably not.
"The only poll that matters is the one on election day" is one of the least true truisms. For campaign strategists trying to figure out where to spend their ad budgets, polls are enormously important. Likewise for journalists blocking out a fall travel schedule. But a poll of foreigners' feelings is not going to carry much weight even if Americans were paying attention – which we tend not to do until Labor Day (3 September).
What psephologists dream about is a bellwether – a poll, or a state, that will reliably predict the election result (with the margins of statistical error, of course). In Mr Bartley's burger bar, off Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts – though awkward to admit – my favorite has long been the "Mitt Romney", named in honor of the former governer and consisting of a perfectly grilled burger topped with swiss cheese, grilled onions and a side of onion rings, for $11.70. For the past few years, however, the menu has also offered a "Barack Obama": with feta cheese, lettuce, tomato, red onion, and french fries, for an austere price of $10.15. If you factor in the cost advantage of the Obama with the home turf factor for the Romney and were able to find out comparative sales over the next few months, I think you might just have a bellwether in a bun.