Winners bonus

For US President Barack Obama,victory has been a long time coming. Of course,he won an election,and a tough one. But,for someone as accustomed to success as Obama,the first 14 months of his presidency must have been nightmarish. He came into office with an enormously ambitious legislative agenda: new thinking on financial regulation; closing Guantanamo Bay; immigration reform; withdrawing from Iraq; and fixing Americas healthcare. For months,not one looked like getting done. Healthcare was the most likely till back-to-basics Republican Scott Brown won liberal icon and healthcare prime mover Teddy Kennedys supposedly safe Massachusetts Senate seat. Healthcare was finished,the conventional wisdom went,and Obamas bipartisan,take-everyone-along approach was too.

Two months on,a landmark healthcare reform bill has been passed,the first major piece of rights-based legislation in the US since the 60s Civil Rights era; if assented to by the Senate,it will end Americas ignominious stint as the only major advanced economy without universal healthcare. Nice for the Americans,sure. But whats in it for the rest of the world? What is worth noting is that conventional wisdom may have got one thing right: in that the Obama administration might have realised that,with a solid Democratic majority in both houses,perennially requiring bipartisan support is pointless. This bill bears the imprint of attempts to try and appease Republicans who were never going to vote for it anyway: it has no cost-control mechanism,no attempt to force competition on the big insurers who will benefit massively.

If Obama has decided to follow House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosis lead and junk the flower-child why-cant-we-all-get-along approach,then it does matter for the rest of the world. A freshly empowered White House might be more willing on climate change,a tougher negotiator on trade. Perhaps all the ambitious bits of his agenda arent doomed after all.