Thomas was dramatically wrong about Reagan's speech, which included sustained praise for America's allies, and equating Obama to God was breathtaking even for the US press corps. But Thomas's central observation was unquestionably correct: Obama is above all that patriotism stuff.

Obama is not the first Democratic nominee to hold these views, but he is the first to win the presidency. The then Vice-President George H. W. Bush best described the type in 1988, contrasting himself with his opponent, Michael Dukakis: "He sees America as another pleasant country on the UN roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe. I see America as the leader — a unique nation with a special role in the world." The Dukakis/Obama approach of near-universal "moral equivalency" is widely held by European leaders, but not previously by a US President, so we will now find out just how European we have become.

Two other elements in Obama's thinking are critical. First, he is not George W. Bush. He is Barack Obama, a man who has already written two autobiographies and who has ascended continuously and effortlessly to ever-higher public office. Hence, Obama need do little except show up and "change" will occur in the global arena, without the need for "chauvinistic" exertions on behalf of "parochial" American interests, which, as embodied by President Bush, are inevitably arrogant and disrespectful of others. Second, Obama has not yet adjusted to governance rather than campaigning or to being in the Executive rather than the Legislative branch of government. Campaigning is now continuous, but not since Reagan has a President struck the right balance with governance. Moreover, failing to shift psychologically from Senator to President is a perennial US problem. Being President actually means governing, as opposed to flitting from speech to speech and vote to vote, which "showhorse" Senators (contrasted with their "workhorse" counterparts) are all too happy to do. Moreover, whether as legislator or as campaigner, Obama has concentrated on, and manifestly feels more comfortable with, domestic rather than foreign policy (with the singular exception of opposing the Iraq war in the 2008 campaign).

One response to this analysis is the number of questions where Obama has essentially ratified or continued Bush Administration policies. For example, US troop withdrawal timetables from Iraq and the overall US political and military posture there are, so far, hard to differentiate materially from Bush's. A breathtaking amount of Bush-era detention and terrorist-interrogation policies remain in place, despite the vivid propaganda successes of signing Executive Orders to close Guantánamo and preclude "enhanced interrogation techniques". In fact, Bush himself signalled a desire to close Guantánamo and had suspended the criticised interrogation methods, very infrequently used in any case, years earlier. Finally, on Afghanistan, Obama's increase in US force levels was planned during the Bush presidency (as were even higher levels), and advocated during the 2008 campaign by the Republican nominee John McCain.

Seemingly robust, but not really. Obama succeeded brilliantly in painting Iraq as Bush's (and then McCain's) war, using his opposition to capture the Democratic Party nomination from the sure winner, Hillary Clinton. Obama's course as President, anguishing to the American Left, is intended to protect himself from conservative criticism while he rearranges the American economy. The Left has nowhere else to go, as they and Obama both well know. The same logic applies to interrogation and detention, although heightened by the new Administration's uncomfortable education in reality: what to do with these captured cold-blooded terrorists and extremists is actually a most difficult question. Now that Obama cannot criticise from the campaign trail or the Senate floor, but must actually be America's "chief executive," operational reality intrudes. These were hard questions for Bush, and they will be hard questions for Obama. On Afghanistan, no one in Washington has missed the criticism from the Democratic Party's Left and their ultimatum that Obama has basically one year to solve the Afghan problem. Good luck with that! (Nor has anyone in Washington missed Europe's unwillingness to increase materially its force levels in Afghanistan, despite the expectation that Obama's Inauguration would unleash torrents of co-operation unseen during the Bush years.)