This immediate proof of mismanagement adds to the cumulative feeling on so many other fronts that Mr Obama and his team simply don't understand governance. Last month Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Fed, warned America that without more care being taken it could have a Greece-style debt problem. The president seemed to regard this warning as so self-evidently absurd that he quickly asked Congress for another $50 billion for various social projects. Last week, benefits for the long-term unemployed were extended for another six months at a cost of $34 billion. The health care programme is forecast to cost at least $863 billion. The total deficit this year is to be $1.47 trillion. America's debt is likely to be $18.5 trillion by 2020, though it will be so low as that only if growth is maintained at 4 per cent: it is currently 3 per cent, and rocky.

Unemployment is 9.5 per cent and forecast to stay there for the time being. There are three million more jobless than when Mr Obama came to power, and unemployment among teenagers is around 25 per cent. The very constituencies to which he made his greatest appeal – the young and the disadvantaged – still suffer. This is despite the $787 billion stimulus programme last year, much of which was sucked into America's corrupt and inefficient local government system, or did favours for congressmen and senators, or provided wonderful pay days for trade unionists, or in some cases all three at once. The President sought the stimulus on the grounds that it would stop unemployment rising above 8 per cent; so that has been an expensive failure. All Mr Obama appears to have done is wave the money goodbye. Last week, trying not to sound provoked, Mr Bernanke announced that there was "unusual uncertainty" about economic recovery. The dollar fell against sterling and even the euro.

Mr Bernanke wants a renewal of Bush-era tax cuts for people earning over $250,000 a year, which are due to expire on December 31. So do many Democrats, who fear that removing incentives and purchasing power from the better-off will harm recovery by reducing consumption and employment. These are arguments familiar from Britain, about the equally damaging and pointless 50 per cent rate. The response, by Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, is familiar too – the "rich" must take their share of the burden. It is equally specious here; the political importance of bashing the (presumably Republican) wealthy plainly exceeds what is good for the US economy.

One advocate of renewing the cuts is Newt Gingrich, architect of the "Contract with America" in 1994, and now threatening to seek the Republican nomination in 2012. He is the sort of opponent Mr Obama should fear, because he is experienced, an intellectual, and has widespread name recognition. Yet some Democrats (including Howard Dean, the party chairman) are urging him to stand, if only to ensure that the Republicans make some policies that the Democrats can attack: for, at the moment, the GOP is simply attacking the incumbents rather than offering any solutions of its own. Wishing for Mr Gingrich (or someone like him) is a big gamble, though: all that seems to prevent Mr Obama's being confirmed as a one-term president is the absence of a credible Republican against him.

One senses that the Democrats are talking down the likelihood of success in the mid-terms in order to look better if things go less badly than expected. It is possible that they could lose control of Congress, though that looks a close-run thing. They certainly won't lose their Senate majority, though the Republicans should get sufficient seats to operate a filibuster against legislation they don't like. A lame-duck Congress like that would emphasise the reality of a lame-duck president. On Wall Street, some former donors to the Democrats, so angry at what they perceive to be Mr Obama's vindictive and ignorant attempts to re-regulate them, have stopped giving money to the party. Some are saying that if the mid-terms go badly then Hillary Clinton should resign as Secretary of State and declare her intention to seek the Democratic nomination in 2012. That is highly unlikely; but the fact that it is being talked about seriously in Mrs Clinton's New York heartland ought to horrify the president.

Last week an opinion poll reported that not only is Mr Obama less popular than Mrs Clinton (who by spending much time out of the country succeeds in seeming only vaguely associated with him), he is less popular than her husband, who is forbidden by the constitution from seeking the highest office again. President Clinton is much in demand for the mid-term campaign, but it will be interesting to see what sort of role his wife plays in it. There is no summer vacation for those seeking re-election in November, who will work hard throughout August to get their message over. They will return to Washington in September to see one of the Democrats' most senior congressmen, Charlie Rangel, a costermonger-like 80-year-old representative from New York, tried on an $831,000 ethics violation; which in its way sums up what the Democrats have done for America over the last couple of years. In that ecstatic dawn in November 2008, the Democrats would not have thought that things could turn out like this. But that is the trouble with the modern political mind these days: it never does think.