{"id":1728,"date":"2010-01-17T12:33:51","date_gmt":"2010-01-17T11:33:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=1728"},"modified":"2010-01-17T12:33:51","modified_gmt":"2010-01-17T11:33:51","slug":"how-is-obama-doing-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=1728","title":{"rendered":"How is Obama doing? (1)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Whenever I contemplate this question, I&#8217;m tempted to recall what Chou En-lai said when asked what he thought of the French Revolution: &#8220;It&#8217;s too soon to tell.&#8221; After all, Obama is only one year into a four-year term and hopefully will have eight years in the White House. But there&#8217;s no doubt that he&#8217;s under pressure and this Tuesday the Democrats could lose the Senate seat held by Edward Kennedy until his death which would take away the power of the party in the upper house to force through legislation like the healthcare bill.<br \/>\nA friend with whom I recently discussed Obama&#8217;s performance has drawn my attention to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.timesonline.co.uk\/tol\/news\/world\/ireland\/article6968384.ece\">this column<\/a> which Andrew Sullivan wrote for the &#8220;Sunday Times&#8221; over Christmas. The piece concludes:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;It\u2019s worth remembering that America is a vast and cumbersome machine, designed to resist deep change. That this one man has moved the country a few key, structural degrees in one year, and that the direction is as clear and as strategic as that first embraced by Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (in the opposite direction) is under-appreciated. But the shift is real and more dramatic than current events might indicate. I wouldn\u2019t bet on its evanescence quite yet.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This certainly reflects my views.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Whenever I contemplate this question, I&#8217;m tempted to recall what Chou En-lai said when asked what he thought of the French Revolution: &#8220;It&#8217;s too soon to tell.&#8221; After all, Obama is only one year into a four-year term and hopefully will have eight years in the White House. But there&#8217;s no doubt that he&#8217;s under [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-us-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1728\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}