A year after Barack Obama's inauguration as US President, what are the prospects of his promise to reconfigure politics as Americans know it?
Recent polls show Mr Obama to be the least popular President, at this stage of the term, among white voters for the last 30 years (that is, as long as this poll has been taken). Moreover, the gap between him and the next least popular President is significant.
Arguably, this poll result is not as meaningful as it looks. It only covers Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, none of whom began their tenure facing the twin challenges of economic disaster and a possibly unwinnable war in Afghanistan. And with unemployment at 10 per cent, Mr Obama's ratings could be a lot worse.
But, stage right, there enters the special election in Massachusetts to fill the late Senator Edward Kennedy's seat. (This is being written before the votes have been counted.)
An ultra-Democrat state, a seat first occupied by Senator Kennedy in 1962 (and earlier by his brother, JFK), an initially popular Democrat candidate, Attorney General Martha Coakley... and it suddenly turns too close to call, with Mr Obama himself having to take time off over the weekend to campaign on behalf of his party's candidate, now the underdog. If her rival, state senator Scott Brown is elected, he would be the first Republican from Massachusetts to be elected to the US Senate in almost 40 years.
Yes, Ms Coakley committed cardinal mistakes, complacency and worse. But Mr Brown is running on an anti-Obama ticket. He is winning independent voters over - the same voters that Mr Obama made his own just over a year ago - on the battlecry of stopping Mr Obama's healthcare Bill from going through the US Senate.
Senator Kennedy's seat is the crucial 60th seat in the Senate that Mr Obama needs to stop the opposition from blocking his Bill... and to pass it through. If this Bill is blocked, it would be the end of Mr Obama's top (constructive) item on his domestic agenda.
Many commentators have pointed out the multiple ironies. Senator Kennedy campaigned passionately for higher healthcare coverage in his time. A few months after his death, the Senate race became so close that the same seat could be used to block the enactment of such a provision.
The sharpest ironies, however, have to do with how Mr Brown has run his campaign. He has managed to project Mr Obama, just a year in office, as the establishment: an elite establishment ready to tax and spend and intervene without warrant into people's lives. And he has shown fluency with the methods of the electronic campaigning, voter mobilisation and fund-raising. At a late stage of the race, he was raking in a million dollars a day.
In other words, Mr Brown has run his race in ways that resemble closely some of Mr Obama's own but on a very different agenda.
Of course, the political party that has to fix an economic mess is always punished, even when voters acknowledge that it did not create it. (Mr Brown has been careful not to have national Republican figures campaign along his side.)
Mr Obama's superstar status may even have hurt him, as voters have expected better economic results sooner and at less cost. (Whereas most mainstream economists not working for the White House have said the mistake was not to make the stimulus package even bigger.)
And some of Mr Obama's liberal base, led on to dream that one could have politics without politicking and Washington backroom compromises, may be disappointed by the deals that Mr Obama has had to cut.
He will probably bounce back. An able politician, although time has seen his ratings fall from the heights they reached last year, it has also confirmed that his ticket was certainly the better choice in 2008.
However, his difficulties show us that he has not reinvented politics, neither in methods nor in the coalitions he has built. And we can understand the degree to which his international behaviour is partly driven, classically, by domestic concerns.
His behaviour at Copenhagen was predictable (and indeed predicted): Whatever his convictions on climate change, he faces crucial mid-term elections later this year and cannot afford to have them turn out badly. Any strong commitment on climate change targets would have hurt him, especially in industrial states.
The recent US pressure to have Malta contribute to the efforts in Afghanistan can also be read in this light. To the Afghans, our contribution will not make much difference, especially to a cynical, corrupt, ungrateful President like Hamid Karzai, who told a US interviewer that his country will not miss the UN staff that recently pulled out.
But to the US it does: not for what we do on the ground but because we ratchet up the number of nations joining the effort under US leadership. Remember the US Ambassador underlining it was already 43?
The sheer number is meant to act as talisman in US politics: a potent symbol and argument for Mr Obama's restoration of US standing in the world and a quick "result" improving over the "isolated" years of George W. Bush. Needing to lead the US in a most difficult, unpopular war, he needs all the talismans he can get.
ranierfsadni@europe.com