Towards the end of an American tour last week to promote my new book Welcome to Obamaland: I've Seen Your Future and It Doesn't Work, I began to feel ever so slightly guilty. Partly it was all those people I met still wearing their "Vote Obama" badges like religious talismans, still quite obviously brimming with audacious hope for their country's bright future under the new Obamessiah. Who was I to come from the other side of the pond and rain on their parade? Mainly, though, it was because I'd never expected the Obama project to go pear-shaped quite so soon....