BARACK OBAMA AT HALFWAY (2)

Since American presidents are constitutionally barred from more than two 4-year terms, Barack Obama's victory this week means that he is now halfway through his period in office. Writing after the mid-terms two years ago, I said that he had been a disappointment after the hype of his original election in 2008, and that he faced a tough fight in order to be re-elected. Both the disappointment and the fight continued until this week. In the end he won the fight; now, having secured his re-election, he has the opportunity to do something about the disappointment.

The biggest part of that concerns the fact that America is, politically speaking, split right down the middle. Mr. Obama may have won handsomely in the rather quirky electoral college that ultimately decides; but the popular vote was almost exactly a dead heat. Four years ago, he portrayed himself as a unifier, but the outcome was anything but. True, he has had to deal with a House of Representatives dominated by Republicans of a particularly obstreperous hue. But that doesn't excuse the fact that his re-election campaign focussed almost exclusively on denigrating Mitt Romney's character and achievements, and spent more on negative advertisements than any other in history. Since the Republicans still hold the House, and they are still obstreperous, something has to change if the President is to achieve anything in domestic policy.

And change quickly. Because looming just over the horizon on 1 January is the so-called "fiscal cliff". Unless something is done, the combination of tax rises and automatic spending cuts will be so severe that the U.S. will tip back into recession. Sorting that out would not be easy at the best of times; but trying to do it in the so-called "lame duck" session of Congress before the new representatives take up their seats makes it even harder. And that's not taking the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays into account.

Some sort of fudge will probably be found before 1 January, the alternative is simply too gruesome to contemplate. But it will be a short-term fix that doesn't really solve anything. What is required is a medium-term plan that moves America from trying to be a European country in terms of spending entitlements while being a Latin American country in terms of revenue raising. Such a plan will require genuine compromise with the Republican party, something that Mr. Obama has conspicuously not shown so far.

Some leaders (George W. Bush springs to mind) promise much and achieve little or nothing; some are not expected to do well, and achieve a lot (Harry Truman, say). Barack Obama's problem was that the expectations engendered by his simply getting to the Oval Office were so huge, that he was almost bound to disappoint. That may have been unfair, but politics is unfair. If he wants to be remembered for something more than being the first black President and killing Osama bin Laden, then he needs to roll his sleeves up and get his hands dirty. And soon.

Walter Blotscher