How did Barack Obama become such a turkey?

No one told us it would be boring, but it is. We're talking here about the Obama presidency. Having an adulterer and a moron at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for eight years apiece, plus Dick Cheney down the corridor, spoiled us. Which side of Bill's head did Hillary hit with the lamp? Would George fight his way to the end of the sentence in his daily battles with the English language?

These days tranquility reigns - or seems to - in the Obamas' private quarters. Senior White House staffers remain loyal and tight-lipped. Small wonder Jay Leno's nightly TV show is sagging. There's been nothing to make jokes about, at least until Sarah Palin went on her book tour.

Jimmy Carter was another Democratic president who didn't drink or fornicate or steal. But he had Brother Billy and the colourful Bert Lance as his director of OMB, already mired in southern Gothic scandal by the middle of Carter's first year in office.

He had the late Hamilton Jordan as his chief of staff, getting drunk at state dinners and making lewd verbal overtures to the wife of the Egyptian ambassador. Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel may be foul-mouthed, but thus far he's run a ship offering about as much drama as the upper executive tier of an insurance company in Ames, Iowa.

Politics are getting duller by the day too, as the idealists watch their expectations trickling all too swiftly through the hour glass. Visions of a decent state-backed public system of health insurance have – in the current bills – mutated into their polar opposite: enforcement of compulsory purchase of private health coverage –  the "reform" imposed by those insurance executives in Ames -  and an Obama-backed hike in health insurance costs for low-income seniors.

Obama makes gestures to please everybody then it’s business as usual

The fact that Obama's dipped below 50 per cent in public approval, so the pollsters tell us, is nothing particularly unusual for a new president at this stage of the game. What's going to stop him sliding down more? Next week, he's scheduled to announce that that he’s ordering 34,000 more troops to head for Afghanistan.

I heard someone on NPR say this was Obama's compromise between General Stanley McChrystal's original demand for 50,000 troops and those who have been imploring Obama to nix further deployments and bring all the troops home. In other words, we have a typical Obama compromise, making gestures designed to please everybody, but in the end going along with Business as Usual.

Like his performance on Guantanamo: pledge to close it down, then drag your feet, continue secret renditions of captives to other prisons like Bagram, and finally engineer the resignation of Gregory Craig, the White House counsel who was trying to close Guantanamo, now open until every remaining prisoner can be sent to replications of Guantanamo somewhere else.

Such decisions are coming thick and fast. Right before Thanksgiving came news that the Obama administration has decided not to sign an international convention banning land mines which now has support from more than 150 countries.

Yes, there was a land-mine policy 'review' by the administration, now denounced by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy as "cursory and halfhearted". But State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told the press last Tuesday that US defence requirements really require land-mines and Obama is going to stay with the Bush policy, though - here's the Obamian compromise - the US government is, for the first time, sending an official observer to a session of the International Convention, meeting in Cartagena, Colombia. This will come as a great comfort to the relatives of those thousands - half of them children - blown to bits each year by land-mines littering war-torn landscapes across the globe.

Obama's blend of opportunism draped in high-minded verbiage is beginning to rile some liberals - the same way Jimmy Carter's similar mix did 30 years ago. A bellwether here is the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, who has recently turned in two acrid columns on the President.

Having spent months in the vanguard of the Democrats' favorite blood sport, flaying Sarah Palin, Dowd suddenly declared that Palin at least speaks from the heart and that Obama should take some lessons from the former governor of Alaska in how to connect with ordinary people at the level of genuine emotional conviction.

Then, this week, Dowd wrote an even sharper column charging Obama with callous lack of loyalty to political supporters such as Greg Craig, who jumped ship from the Clinton campaign last year and did Obama great service. Dowd also scored Obama's signal lack of gratitude to Caroline Kennedy, whose endorsement of Obama last year gave him a powerful lift at a crucial stage in the race.

So, yes, there's discontent and disillusion on the liberal and progressive side - but will this translate into political difficulties for Obama? Probably not. Obama can blow a hundred campaign pledges, douse with Roundup the crop of hopes he planted last year, and still the liberal sector will stay true and delude themselves that hope - though dormant - lives on.

Where else are the liberals to go? African Americans will never desert him in significant numbers. And remember, the progressive crowd stuck with Clinton through the gutting of welfare, the effective death penalty act, an appalling immigration bill and a hundred other presumptive death blows.

Like Clinton, Obama is unconcerned by the anguish to his left. His target will be the independents who put him in the White House and who deserted him in the November elections in states like Virginia.

Independents, so the pollsters claim, are worried by the deficit. They think Obama's efforts to rekindle the economy and create jobs have been far too prodigal. They want austerity budgets, even as the liberals shout for a new stimulus bill, and the jobless total rises.

Obama is already triangulating, just as Clinton did, from the moment he enlisted Republicans to push through the North American Free Trade Agreement, in the teeth of Democrats in the House. Obama may well do the same if Democrats in Congress mount any serious opposition to his expansion of the war in Afghanistan. The prospect is cheerless - looking more and more like the boring, respectable, lethal corporate rule of the Eisenhower years. ·