This week, an ABC-Washington Post poll found that while US President Barack Obama's approval ratings were still high, perceptions of his handling of the economy have started to slip. Only a slender majority of Americans now think his stimulus package will put the economy back on a growth path. Meanwhile, more Americans are worrying that the resultant budget deficit will become a big problem in the future.

Although a minor news item, this finding could hold a deeper - and for the Obama administration, more worrying - significance. There is a basic principle in US politics called the presidential business cycle. Because of fixed terms, incoming US presidents tend to apply bitter medicine to sputtering economies at the start of their terms. A year or two of pain drives down their approval ratings. But as the medicine takes effect and the economy restructures, things begin to pick up just as the country heads back to the polls in year four. Voila.

Reversed cycle

Obama's problem is that he has reversed the cycle. In part, this could not be avoided: in the midst of the worst economic crisis in recent memory, it made eminent sense to introduce a big stimulus package to save jobs. But the risk is that, if the package does not work, America will wake up to the effects of big debts just around the time it goes to the mid-term elections next year.

Should the Democrats suffer losses in next year's mid-term elections, it won't hurt Obama any. His job is secure until 2013. The problem is that, if the economy were to go back into recession next year, and another stimulus package was necessary, Congress might be less willing to go along.

Here's the problem. Americans can probably be persuaded that a heavy debt load is a short-term, necessary evil. But the bank bailout has also cost hundreds of billions of dollars. In the public imagination, its principal effect has been to save bloated bankers, who are already restoring the generous compensation packages that so outraged Americans at the height of the crisis. They are also using their lobbying power to resist the government's efforts to regulate them more closely.

Eye to restructuring

Complicating this is the fact that the US government has also taken over what was once the world's largest car-maker, General Motors, with an eye to restructuring it and saving it. But this restructuring, to succeed, will have to eliminate many jobs and drive down pay - not an easy thing for a union-friendly president to go along with. The resulting job losses could drive America's unemployment rate yet higher.

So if, come next year, the unemployment rate remains high, a government-owned car company is laying off workers and driving down wages, the debt has ballooned, the economy goes back into recession, and the president returns to Congress to ask for more money, he could face a wall of outrage. Furthermore, if, as some analysts fear, the US banking system has by then entered its second wave of crisis (as credit-card and mortgage defaults worsen), his enemies will accuse him of funnelling money to his rich friends on Wall Street while filling the unemployment lines with his - by then, no doubt, former - friends from Main Street. Moreover, rising debt will drive up interest rates, hurting the middle class, too.

That is my fear: that, come the next election, the Obama who can do no wrong will be redefined by his opponents as the Obama who did no right. His coziness with the bankers, which is being politely overlooked at the moment, may become a big electoral liability.

John Rapley is president of the Caribbean Policy Research Institute (CaPRI), an independent think tank affiliated to the UWI, Mona. Feedback may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.