President Obama: as bad as Jimmy Carter?

The first months of Obama's administration have been a unprecedented disaster, argues Bartle Bull in this month's Prospect. Instead of trying to fix the economy, Obama is using the crisis to push an revolutionary (and unpopular) social agenda, and his plans to radically reform healthcare, education and environmental policy are bound to fail, predicts Bull. America is still a majority centre-right nation and, in massively expanding the role of the state, Obama is giving Americans the opposite of what they thought they were getting when they voted for him. Combine this with the administration's ongoing staffing crisis, an ineffective leader at the helm of the treasury and a weak foreign policy, and this president could turn out to be as ineffective as Jimmy Carter.

So has Bull, who was among the first western journalists to call the turn in the Iraq war, now done the same with the Obama presidency? Or is this essay just another example of the right-wing ad-hominems we heard during the election campaign? Weigh in here with your views.