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Obama: The Enigma

"One minute he is the cool, aloof sophisticate who refuses to affect the belief that ranting would stop the flow of oil. The next he strikes an assonant, populist tone of synthetic moral outrage. Too often he appears as uncomfortable in his own skin as others are with its colour, and that's a mortal threat in a country that copes with paradox and complexity less well than most."

Who are we talking about here? None other than President Obama. The writer is The Independent's op-ed writer Matthew Norman in an assessment of Obama, by an "outsider", in "Obama: an enigma instead of a leader".

"The current consensus in the United States, where admittedly they lack the necessary perspective to make the judgement, is that we have; that the man hailed as the messiah is, at best, a very average presidential boy indeed. Obama remains under incessant fire from left, right and centre over everything from his tonally confused response to the oil spill, via last week's unnervingly Blairesque appearance on a daytime chat show, to his deliberate neo-Marxist ruination of the thriving economy he inherited from George W Bush."

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