United States of Paralysis

Daily Mail
"More important still, however, is the vacuum across the Atlantic.
President Barack Obama, who took office almost three years ago amid such high hopes, now clings to the White House amid collapsed poll ratings and a real threat that the American people will evict him at next autumn’s election.

The United States, as that great historian Sir Michael Howard has said, remains ‘the only nation able, and sometimes willing, to get things done in the world’. Yet this mighty country today finds its political system almost paralysed, its leader overwhelmingly concerned with his own re-election next year, rather than with leading the West out of its slough of despond."