PRESIDENT OBAMA SNOWED UNDER BY HIS PROMISE OF ACTIONS

When President Barack Obama gets back to work in the Oval Office on Monday, he will find that his agenda for 2010 looks rather different to how it did before his Christmas break in Hawaii.

For one, national security has shot to the top of his to-do list with the attempted Christmas day terrorist attack and the holes in the US’s intelligence systems it exposed. His challenges in Afghanistan, meanwhile, deepened with a New Year’s day suicide attack that killed eight Central Intelligence Agency officers.

The president’s desk was far from empty when he left Washington on Christmas eve – the healthcare reform legislation he wanted to sign before the end of 2009 still requires a lot of work, as does financial regulation, while the unemployment rate remains in double ­digits.

This year Mr Obama will have to juggle two wars and a growing al-Qaeda threat against a slew of domestic tasks, all the while grappling with the reality that his political honeymoon is over.

“The president has a choice to make and only he can make it,” says Bill Galston, a former Clinton administration adviser now at the Brookings Institution.

“Is 2010 going to be the year of jobs and the economy or is it going to a year where the American people stand by angrily while the Senate debates matters such as cap-and-trade and immigration reform?” Mr Galston asks.

Mr Obama put both climate change and immigration high on his priority list when he took office, but with the economic recovery failing to translate into job creation and healthcare reform not yet passed, he will have to focus on the issues that Americans really care about, analysts say.

The president stepped up his administration’s efforts to counter the jobs crisis, holding summits in December with chief executives and economists to discuss job creation ideas, and urging bankers to start lending again, partly to spur on a hiring boom.

He had been planning to focus on jobs when he returned to the office on Monday, but healthcare will consume much of his January. The bill that passed through the Senate on Christmas eve now has to be merged with the House version, which is generally more liberal, except on abortion funding.

That merger process is expected to be difficult and will require Mr Obama’s intervention to persuade liberal Democrats to pass the merged bill, which political necessity dictates must mirror the Senate version.

With so many pressing tasks on his agenda, the criticism of the president’s first year in office that he was trying to do too much at once looks set to be repeated. But Mr Obama’s advisers say he has been delivering on his campaign promises.

“He’s doing remarkable work on these systemic problems like healthcare, energy, education reform,” said David Plouffe, Mr Obama’s presidential campaign manager.

“Not all of the issues that he is pursuing will go through the legislative crucible – it’s going to take time and it’s going to take effort and it’s going to be hard.”

But if the voting public perceive the president to be focusing too much on second-tier issues, even if they were presidential campaign pledges, he will be seen to be out of touch.

That would be especially damaging this year, because the mid-term congressional elections, due in November, could see Democrats lose their majority in the Senate and erode their hold over the House of Representatives.

“The president will have to shape his agenda and his travel schedule, and fundraising efforts this year will have at least one eye on November,” Mr Galston of Brookings said.

With many liberal and independent voters voicing disappointment at Mr Obama’s performance to date, many analysts agree that the president must sharpen his focus this year.

“What [Americans] are seeing is weakness, waff­ling, and wandering through the wilderness without an ideological compass,” Drew Westen, professor at Emory University, wrote in a blog on the Huffington Post website. “That’s a recipe for going nowhere fast – but getting there by November.”

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