As for your own leadership, here is some advice. Do not imitate Mr Obama. He has been a disappointment; learn from his mistakes. [SNIP]

[SNIP]

Here are the things he got wrong. In the middle of an economic crash, and in the middle of record-breaking federal budgets and budget deficits, Mr Obama started a new entitlement. This struck people, by which I mean almost everyone, as off-point. We are in a crisis, part of the crisis involves spending money we don't have, and our answer is to spend more? It wasn't a policy, it was a non sequitur.

Moreover, the President's decision to focus his entire first year on health care, when the voters were focused on the economy, on unemployment, on deficits, demonstrated, in the end unhappily for him and frustratingly for his fellow citizens, that he simply wasn't thinking about what they were thinking about. In a high economy this might have been forgiven if he'd been generally understood to be a visionary. But he didn't come across as a visionary – "We will go this way, the path may not be clear to all but I can see the sunlight through the hills beyond." No. He came across as a detached academic who believed in abstract notions he'd picked up in the faculty lounge.

To make it all worse, just before he went down the health care pass, he put forward, and saw passed, a stimulus Bill that shockingly – I am not being ironic – could not draw the support of a single Republican congressman. Not one. He should have done everything he could, made whatever painful compromises, to garner just a little grouping of Republican support. He needed a Bill he could claim as bipartisan.