BLAIRISH:

There's a better label for Obama than conservative: Tory. The President is no kind of revolutionary. The change we can believe in is the change needed so things can remain much as they were. This is one reason why he has disappointed what remains of the Democratic left. From Gitmo to drone warfare; from protecting Wall street from the torch-and-pitchfork brigade to accepting the need for long-term deficit-reduction Obama has proved himself a very rum type of peacenik-socialist.

And as we all know by now, his landmark healthcare bill began life on the conservative side of the aisle. It is easy to imagine either Richard Nixon or George HW Bush signing it.

That's the point, however. The conservative movement hates wets and Obama is pretty darn wet. If you think of Obama as an American kind of Tory then the otherwise laughable Republican accusation that Obama is more interested in managing American decline (whether relative or absolute) than in providing the kind of robust leadership needed for a new American century at least begins to make some kind of conceptual sense.

This posits Obama as the leader of a failed (and elitist!) establishment that must be swept aside for America to regain the swagger and muscular confidence that is her birth-right and destiny.

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