“How’s that hopey-changey thing working out for you?” jeered Sarah Palin earlier this year – in a dig at the soaring rhetoric that helped Barack Obama win the presidency in 2008.
As the Democrats’ brace themselves for big losses in Tuesday’s midterm elections, Ms Palin’s mockery will sting. But her gibe applies just as acutely to President Obama’s fans outside the US, as to his supporters inside America. It is hard to exaggerate the emotions invested in the “hopey-changey thing” around the world.
Just think of the cheering crowds at Mr Obama’s open-air speech in Berlin in the summer of 2008; the rave reviews given to the newly-elected president’s Cairo speech on Islam and the west; the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Mr Obama, when he had barely had time to arrange his pens on the Oval Office desk.