Caroline Kennedy-Pipe: Battered and bruised, but with a fighting chance

If it is true, however, as the former Governor of New York Mario Cuomo famously said, that you campaign with poetry but you govern with prose, it would seem that President Barack Obama's prose has been pretty leaden of late. "Shellacked", to use his own words, by the voters in the recent November mid-term elections, now constrained by a largely Republican Congress at home, empowered (though also intimated by) the emergent Tea Party movement and faced with multiple challenges abroad. It is becoming increasingly tempting to write Obama off; to see him as a one-term president.

As American mourns the victims of the Tucson shootings, and US congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords fights for her life, I think that is a mistake.

Turn first to his domestic political prospects. Despite his poor showing in the mid-terms and many real problems – unemployment running at 10 per cent (the highest for three decades), the aftermath of the BP oil spill and falling approval ratings (now at 45 per cent, down from highs of 70-80 per cent at the beginning of his first term) – it would be premature to write the president off.

Obama has, for example, achieved significant victories in Congress, most significantly the passing of the healthcare bill – an achievement that had eluded Democratic Presidents for half a century – but also more recently with the repeal of the "don't ask don't tell" policy on gays in the military. And he has shown increasing flexibility viz--viz his Republican opponents – for example compromising on the repeal of the Bush tax cuts for those earning over $260,000 a year. The Republicans, though on a roll in Congress, do not appear to be anything like as impressive in terms of a future presidential race. There are still a wide number of possible candidates – from failed aspirants last time round such as Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, to new kids on the block like Tim Pawlenty, the popular and able governor of Minnesota, or Bobby Jindal the Indian-American governor of Louisiana.

Perhaps most tellingly, Sarah Palin, the darling of the Tea Party movement is failing to make inroads outside the Republican right. Her targeting of Gabrielle Giffords, and use of language, is unlikely to win her new supporters.

Indeed despite the handwringing over Obama's approval rating, he would, according to the Wall Street Journal, defeat Palin in a prospective presidential election by some 55 to 33 per cent – a large margin by any judgment. So at home Obama has had some success working, as President Clinton had to do in the second half of his first term, with a resurgent Republican Congress and seemingly marginalising, at least so far, the Palin effect.

But what about foreign policy? After all, it was in that area that Obama was recognised to be inexperienced prior to his election and perhaps in that area too that the most persistent of the challenges facing any president lie. Even just listing them brings home the sheer variety of the problems: A war in Afghanistan that was becoming increasingly unpopular; a situation in Iraq which, while much better than in previous years, was still very unstable; an increasingly assertive China; an ambiguous relationship with an increasingly autocratic Russia; a fractious relationship with the right wing government of Binyamin Netanyahu in Israel and, perhaps most important of all in the short term, the difficult and potentially disastrous problem over Iran's nuclear programme.

How has the President fared given this long and daunting list of challenges? Despite much Republican huffing and puffing, the honest answer has to be not badly. Iraq is, after all, much better than in previous years and looks like remaining so, though it falls far short of the ambitious goals set out by the previous administration.

Relations with Russia – despite the fears of its "mafia"-like status aired in the recent WikiLeaks documents – have been reset, while it is too soon in Afghanistan to tell whether the surge, begun in 2009, has been successful. The major problem longer term is, of course, Iran, but here too Obama – or at least his team – seemed to have learned quickly on the job. Iran is still isolated, growing pressure has been exerted and greater sanctions will follow if there is no agreement; the military option has not been sued but is still there in the background.

In other words, for all his problems, halfway through his first term, President Obama still has everything to play for. His opponents have scored some victories; he has made some mistakes and his list of problems, both domestic and international dauntingly wide and long. But this all goes with the territory. "If you can't stand the heat," the former President Harry Truman once remarked, "get out of the kitchen". So far, at least, Obama seems to have withstood the heat rather well. He is still in there swinging, hence why it is too soon yet to write off the man who inspired so much hope.

Caroline Kennedy-Pipe is professor of war studies at the University of Hull.