The non runner in the US mid-term vote

It’s morning in America! But so far from that bright new dawn that greeted us that brittle sunlit inauguration day just 20 months ago.

Then, the crowds swirled bringing people from far and wide. Three huge black women in the back of a cycle rickshore pedalled by a white woman, the Ambassador from Liberia to the United Nations flanked by two identically clad orange turbaned women crying Obama! Obama!

Not now. Middle America is angry, gripped by fear, and the fear and disillusionment of loss. The economy may be growing but middle class incomes and holdings are shrinking and many worry they’ll never recover. And perhaps they won’t.

I’m on the ground here in Washington DC ahead of tomorrow’s midterm elections. One man’s name, Barack Obama, will not be on the ballot but his presence, performance, and personality will be somewhere between the lead of the pencil and the slash of the cross as people vote in every state in America. A third of the Senate and the whole of the House of Representative together with many Governors’ mansions are up for grabs.

The issue is the economy. But is has been ferociously interwoven with the performance of the President. Strangely, for one who made it into power through the power of literally multi-platform communication, in power is communications have failed. He has failed to play to his achievements – health care, fiscal stimuli, reducing the war commitment in Iraq and more. He has allowed others to define him as a socialist, a big government fanatic and worse.

Into this vacuum has poured the Tea Party. From our staid distance it’s easy to conjure them as ‘Mad Hatter’. But these are the Middle Americans who are hurting; who are the 9.6 per cent unemployed; the negative equity homeowners; the people whose businesses went bust in the crash.

They are open to, and available for Tea Party business, vulnerable to the quick fix “get rid of taxation”, “smash big government”, “reject climate change”, calls that are all about them. They pose as big a risk to the Republican establishment, as the Republicans are to the Democrats.

We are in uncharted waters – for America, for Obama, and for us. I’m off to take the temperature!