Even if he wins, Obama will be diminished

If a US presidential election has the potential to wear down foreign observers, let alone the American public, imagine what it must do to the candidates. The challenger must spend years campaigning for the endorsement of their own party — fighting rebellions and pandering to diehards — while the incumbent has to work equally hard just to keep in play, while also keeping up the presidential day-job.

Perhaps the effects this can have only really sunk in for the President’s supporters as they watched the first debate. His friends have for a while recounted tales of a Commander-in-Chief increasingly disengaged, mooching around the White House as the limitations of the world’s most powerful office sink in. But most of his supporters only became aware of this as they watched their candidate listlessly stumble across what should have been familiar terrain. Who was this man? Surely not the one who had promised to stop the oceans? Or the same person who once promised that ‘we’ were the ones we’ve all been waiting for?