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The US president's confused response to the plan for a mosque near Ground Zero is evidence of a deeper problem he has connecting with many Americans

Is Nick Clegg the new Barack Obama? This ridiculous comparison is not as flattering as it would have been even a year ago when the president's liberal halo was not as tarnished as it has since become.

But seeing his handling Clegg Q & A session with Microsoft this week and listening to him talking about those 100 coalition days on Radio 4 as I type I think I detect a lofty rationality â€" there are less kind descriptions â€" that fails to connect emotionally with the hopes and fears of too many voters in these dangerous times.

Trust, fairness, civil liberties, greater efficiency in a more balanced (also greener) economy, resumed social mobility and cheaper-but-better public services ... It is hard to quarrel with the vision of Britain that Clegg holds out for 2015. If only it were that easy. He'll learn.

"Smug" is the word I'm trying to avoid here. And it reminds me of that air of superiority, moral and intellectual, which the 44th president of the United States brings all too often to his public utterances and political calculations.

Over a drink the other evening I was quizzed by a British friend, married to an American and living in a liberal university enclave in the US. Why is she finding the British media so negative about Obama on her current visit, she asked. "It's not what I get from the New York Times and NPR."

Well, I was also a devotee of the NYT and non-commercial National Public Radio when I lived in the US. But I never looked to either of them to tell me what was going on in their own country, I explained. They are both too grand, too lofty.

The problem with the president, I told my friend that he 's too much of the brain and can not connect emotionally with the growing number of American voters - independent, who supported him in 2008, it seems, peeling away now - who fear for their homes and jobs, if they have.

Almost as bad, his own party, congressmen and activists, aren't sure what the president stands for. He doesn't lead from the front enough, he doesn't make his positions sufficiently clear. He doesn't do politics â€" low politics, which are a necessary tool of his chosen trade â€" well enough. Doing lofty isn't enough.

In consequence too many Americans think the debt problem and recession are his issues, not the legacy he inherited from an ideologically rigid Bush administration and a reckless, badly regulated financial services industry.

Many people seem to blame him - not that BP or its contractors, Halliburton and Transocean - improper handling of oil spill from the Gulf. Some of them believe, some don 't, they are cynical, ignorant or both. The mood of American politics is becoming uglier.

As I tried to persuade my expatriate friend that the president is losing time to turn things around before the Democrats may lose control of the US Congress in November's mid-term elections, I did not know that the president was busy making my point for me.

His cackhanded and unnecessary intervention in a dispute over a proposed mosque of Sufi Islam, and the center two blocks from Ground Zero in Manhattan - the site of 9 / 11 attack on the Twin Towers gave critics a new stick to beat the President and share his side.

As I am sure you heard Obama invoked America's central constitutional tenet â€" the one which saved it the bloodshed and destruction then prevalent in much of Europe â€" that upholds freedom of religion. Fine, but he went on specifically to link it to the Park 51 project in Lower Manhattan. Not so fine.

Next day he tried to unpick the error, which only compounded it. He did something equally gratuitous last year, you may recall, when a distinguished black American academic, Henry Louis Gates, was arrested on suspicion of breaking into his own home near Harvard.

The policeman had been wrong, but Gates has lost it's bad, when it was designed for adults. Obama supported him, but not locked. Not smart very smart man, but smart people often lack basic common sense.

In the mosque affair Obama is right, of course. The historian Simon Schama wrote a moving defence of his position as the true patriot in the affair, custodian of the Founding Fathers' wisdom, which you can find behind the Financial Times pay wall.

Thomas Jefferson, the third president, who drafted the separation of church and state in his native Virginia, is the great enemy of the American right, said Schama. You only have to read some of the names aligned on the other side â€" that ignorant charlatan Sarah Palin, that cynical blowhard Newt Gingrinch, and their kind â€" to know whose side you want to be on.

Unfortunately, being right is rarely enough. In elective politics you have to take people with you. Three quarters of Americans are lined up on the wrong, reactionary side, the ignorant and intolerant side. Unemployment is at 10%, the housing market remains in dire trouble, China's economy just sort-of overtook Japan's, the US is hurting. People lash out.

So Gingrich, who should know better and probably does, wants the mosque left unbuilt until there are churches and synagogues being built in Saudi Arabia, heaven help us. Do we really want America to measure its own standards by those of that hypocritical, theocratic state?

Personally, I can think of more sensitive locations for a new mosque (though there are already two nearby), but one in what once would have been the shadow of the Twin Towers is not a manifestation of Islamic triumphalism â€" it isn't triumphal in 2010, quite the opposite â€" but a vindication of American values.

So was Obama's election. So would be his re-election, with or without Hillary Clinton's presence on the ticket as vice-president, the latest spiffing wheeze in Washington to rescue his career.

But the man has to earn it and he's not doing as well as he should. The only comfort I can spot is that the Republican right is splitting in ways that may just rescue him, picking as official candidates Tea party activists whose views offend mainstream independents even more than the president's priggery.

Here's hoping. As Nick Clegg cheerfully marches deeper into the mire such miscalculations on the Tory right may even comfort him.

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