http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article5109994.ece

“Well, if he wanted to ‘manage expectations’ he needed to have started a lot sooner..” A lightbulb moment there I think.

I guess the communications experts would say ‘It isn’t the message that you send out, it is the message that people hear’. I guess a classic example of this is that my example of Michelle Obama saying ‘he is not a messiah’, has been drowned out by the media picking up on someone comparing him to Moses. Well, that is a bit of a tough one to live up to..

Since reading your posting, I have also thought more about those women who thought that the arrival of a female Prime Minister would be the answer to their prayers. That is a discussion for another post. But yes, I now have to admit that like you it is very easy to get swept up in the ‘hype’ such as happened in 1997 and for reality to kick in soon afterwards.

It would be a dull world where politicians didn’t try and appeal to our aspirations to make a better world for a children and not simply to live for the day. The promise that any child can grow up to be President may mean little to children whose parents are in ill health due to lack of affordable health care. But to give him credit, he looks better placed to ‘unify’ the people of the United States.

Forgive me the reference to class – my point was that the ‘Medium is the message’, and the that politeness and eloquence of the House of Lords isn’t necessarily the style which works best on a blog.

Maybe you could try for a slightly more punchy style here, like Lady Meyer, but possibly not quite as forthright as the style employed by her husband Sir Christopher in his memoirs DC Confidential

Keep up the good work !!

I a just naturally sceptical of the over hyping of one man, I don’t think there’s any code there, female or otherwise. And by the way I am a state educated girl from a home where both parents were working class by background and would put themselves in a lower middle class category by aspiration rather than money. I suppose I am living proof like so many others in the Lords of the social mobility consequences of the 1948 Education Act.

But I remember the wild scenes when Kennedy was elected, very similar to the ones we saw yesterday in Chicago and New York. Yes, Kennedy did some important positive things (especially in my own field of mental health) but when it came to the Cuba ‘Bay of Pigs’ crisis his judgment was flawed.I want to see who Obama appoints to his administration and what policies he espouses in health, employment, foreign affairs. I don’t criticise those who have faith in him, I’m aware however that the public’s mood can change and change quickly if their hopes are not fulfilled quickly.

Certainly I agree that it is fatuous to pretend that McCain would have been a disaster, and that Obama will remove the huge aftershock of the financial crisis in the ‘first hundred days’. Clearly the difference between the two is not that great. But given that he has clearly managed people’s expectations that a long struggle lies ahead, I’m detecting a possible drift towards judging people for having ‘faith’ which rather suggests that you don’t think this can be based on fact ?