Jon Favreau, the 30-year-old director of Obama's speechwriting team, has said that the president "always goes back" to a speech he gave while still a senator at a commencement address at Knox College in 2005 about "the need for collective action in a global society", and certainly the second inaugural evinced a horror of any kind of American unilateral action in foreign policy. Leading from behind as in Libya, or not at all as over the Iranian democracy movement, must be all that can be expected from an Obama second term, as North Korean, Syrian and Iranian tyrants will soon perceive. He might say, "We will support democracy from Asia to Africa, from the Americas to the Middle East, because our interests and our conscience compel us to act on behalf of those who long for freedom," because all presidents have said it ever since JFK's inspiring inauguration address; but he doesn't mean it and will do next to nothing about it.

"A decade of war is now ending," said the president, only two days after Islamist terrorists seized a gas plant in Algeria and killed the first of 37 innocent hostages. Obama's choice of former Senator Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense implies the administration wants a clash with Israel instead of with America's growing (since the Arab Spring) band of enemies in the Middle East. The most worrying part of the speech came when the president tried to equate the aftermath of the Second World War with that of the war against terror, stating: "We are also heirs to those who won the peace and not just the war, who turned sworn enemies into the surest of friends, and we must carry those lessons into this time as well." Just who are these "sworn enemies" of America and democracy that he believes — like the Germans and Japanese of 1945 — can be turned into "the surest of friends" without the intervening stage of a shattering, signed surrender? He didn't say.

It is not as though Obama doesn't know what is really needed for America, speaking as he did of the genuine need "to remake our government, revamp our tax code, reform our schools, and empower our citizens with the skills they need . . . We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of healthcare and the size of our deficit." Yet he has no actual plans to do any of this because of the entrenched interests — especially the tax-lawyers' and teachers' unions — that support the Democratic Party with hundreds of millions of dollars and have successfully blocked reform for years. As for the power of the trial-lawyers in Democratic politics, expect no reform of a legal system that can allow two plaintiffs in Sacramento, California, to sue Penguin Books — full disclosure, my publishers — for the mental trauma of feeling "duped", "betrayed" and "cheated" when Lance Armstrong admitted his autobiography wasn't honest about his drug-taking, and demanding that a publishing house should have somehow known something that decades of professional sports drug-screeners had failed to spot.

In true New Labour style, Obama was keen to try to twist his opponents' arguments into his strengths, in this case the fact that entitlements weaken the American can-do spirit and turn beneficiaries into clients of the state. Yet for Obama: "The commitments we make to each other — through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security — these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great." At this point one might have expected one single example of this actually happening, but the mere expression of it was enough. Similarly, the remark "an economic recovery has begun", was deemed sufficient to turn the anaemic US growth figures into something seemingly substantial. Growth may indeed return to the US during the second term — the swings of boom and bust were not abolished by Gordon Brown, after all — but if it happens it will owe little to him or his woeful Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. This single, throwaway reference to the economy implied that even Messrs Obama and Favreau consider it to be a very small "bucket" for them.