American presidents typically enjoy a political honeymoon, that heady time when the country is utterly thrilled to have someone new to love, to hate, and to yell at when his image appears on the television. Peace and prosperity extend the voters’ patience; shortened attention spans aggravated by instant messaging and 24-hour cable news cycles tend to abbreviate that time when a president can do little wrong. Then, almost without warning or a single act of provocation, the public turns on the president. And the remainder of his term acquires that painful description the then Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used to describe the Iraq war back in 2003: a long, hard slog.

Barack Obama had to know his star was fading when even his friends cringed with some embarrassment at the announcement that the young leader had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (though to his credit, the president appeared as baffled as everyone else at what was, to say the least, a premature honour for someone whose major success as a peacemaker at that point was not being George W Bush). Obama may remain popular overseas (see: Not George W Bush), but his popularity at home is slipping, making it even harder for him to accomplish an ambitious domestic agenda to dramatically overhaul the country’s healthcare system, tighten regulation of the financial markets and diminish global warming.

And even if Obama achieves some or all of these goals, it will mean nothing to voters if the employment situation remains grim. Unlike Obama, the House of Representatives and a third of the US Senate must run for re-election next year, and jobs are an enormous worry. “My Congressional office has become a counselling centre,” says Representative Bill Pascrell, whose staffers in swing-state New Jersey spend their days helping constituents who have lost their homes and jobs or are fighting creditors. The most notable job losses next year may well hit incumbents.

The president will need as much political help as he can muster as he attempts to win support for adding troops in Afghanistan. Republicans want a bigger surge of troops; Democrats are worried about another Vietnam, and nobody wants to spend the money – $1,000,000 per solider, per year – to sustain the effort. Obama may have inherited the war, but he did not inherit the overwhelming public support the war had in its early years. No one wants to lose, but fewer and fewer Americans see the point of spending enormous amounts of money during a struggling economy to pay for a campaign that does not seem to be producing any results.

Harder still is asking American voters to differentiate between al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Fighting both, some analysts believe, will drive the two forces closer together, and it may be impossible to dismantle the Taliban in Afghanistan, where it is so firmly entrenched. But in America, where the ter......