Hey, who's up for giving Obama a second chance?

The best we can say about Obama’s foreign policy record is that he’s not George Bush, that he managed to end the absurd and unjustified war in Iraq. His escalation of the war in Afghanistan has been a failure – every foreign power to invade Afghanistan has been humiliated in the end. Sarkozy took the lead in rallying Nato to aid the Libyan rebels, and Obama’s failure to aid the Syrian rebels seems increasingly like a betrayal of his stated ideals and a failure of leadership.

And yet… the symbolism of an African-American president is still incredibly potent, even after four years. (Yesterday I spotted a poster in the window of a barber shop in the largely African-American South Bronx – a portrait of Martin Luther King under the caption “The Dreamer” beside a portrait of Barack Obama; caption: “The Dream”.) He remains the most charismatic of world leaders. One gets the sense of a man who is comfortable in his skin, comfortable with his place in the world, of a man who generally means what he says, and says it elegantly. It’s hard to get any sense of the personality of Mitt Romney, who seems like a robot with excellent hair.

Obama may have lost some of his mystique, and disappointed many of us, but he hasn’t yet irrevocably betrayed us, or his ideals, and he will probably get another chance to fulfil some of the great expectations of 2008.