This mistake has lost Obama the support of the electoral centre. In the 2009 gubernatorial elections, Republicans gained two-thirds of the independent vote, and the newly-elected Senator Scott Brown won an astonishing three-quarters of independents in heavily Democratic Massachusetts. Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, explained the importance of this reversal over lunch in a popular DC sandwich shop.

"Voters in the centre elected him because of his radically anti-partisan rhetoric," Caldwell remarked. "Yet as you see with his handling of the comprehensive healthcare Bill, he has turned into possibly the most partisan president in recent history." As I made my way to K Street — the home of Washington's lobbying industry — the significance of this observation was brought home by a fleeting glimpse of the former Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, an apt reminder of how quickly fortunes can turn for a polarising administration. 

Whatever his post-partisan rhetoric, the left-of-centre course Obama has charted should come as no surprise to anyone who followed his Senate career or read his campaign pledges. So why the backlash? "He has not been disingenuous in pursuing this agenda," said William Galston, former adviser to President Bill Clinton and a political theorist at the Brookings Institution. "So those who have accused him of backing down on his campaign pledges were perhaps listening to the poetry of the campaign, but not the prose."

Fouad Ajami, the director of the Middle East studies programme at Johns Hopkins University, argued that the rise and fall of Obama should be interpreted in the context of charismatic leaders of mass movements in the Third World. "The American people got the President they deserved," he told me. "He was a vessel into which the crowd poured their desires — they were not looking at the substance of the person they were electing."

The liberal pundits I spoke to felt that Obama's present troubles were less an outright rejection of his agenda than an inevitable manifestation of widespread anxiety over the economy. "Ultimately, this isn't that complicated," said Noam Scheiber, a senior editor at the New Republic. "When the official unemployment rate is 10 per cent, the President's popularity will inevitably suffer."

"Ever since Roosevelt, the President has been held responsible for the welfare of the economy, so in that sense Obama was bound to take a hit," added William Galston.