Obama's failure to endorse government's economic plan isn't good news for the left

There is much crowing from the left that Obama has failed to endorse the Coalition's plans to reduce the deficit by saying lines such as "Our different countries will need to take different paths". However perhaps they should consider that he may not be willing to support our plans because they aren't as quick as his, rather than the other way around.

As the Spectator has shown in this graph, the "Obama plan" sees public spending reduced by a larger percentage in 1 year than we're doing over an entire Parliament.

So why has he been saying this different paths line? Well either
1) He wants to ensure that the Republicans can't accuse him of wanting to go back on what he has already agreed (i.e. not cut as quickly) or;
2) The Coalition (who surely had sight of his speeches and remarks beforehand) didn't want to embolden those on the right who are saying we should be going much quicker than we are, or do any damage to the public's view that we want to go quicker.

Either way, his comments certainly don't endorse the Labour Tax and spend approach, if anything it says the opposite.

Update:
I've just seen the transcript of the joint press conference where Obama says:

"And obviously the nature and role of the public sector in the United Kingdom is different than it has been in the United States.  The pressures that each country are under from world capital markets are different.  The nature of the debt and deficits are different.  And as a consequence, the sequencing or pace may end up being different."

The role and nature of the public sector in the US is that it provides much less to it's citizens than ours, therefore they can cut quicker than we can here, is my reading of that.

Interestingly the PM said:

"But each country is different, but when I look across now and see what the U.S. and the UK are currently contemplating for the future, it’s actually relatively similar program in terms of trying to get on top of our deficits and make sure that debt is falling as a share of GDP...."

"...So as he said, we may take slightly different paths but we want to end up in the same place."

So there's that different paths line again, clearly an agreed line between them.

Update 2:
From the transcript of Obama's speech in Westminster:

"Having come through a terrible recession, our challenge today is to meet these obligations while ensuring that we’re not consumed with a level of debt that could sap the strength and vitality from our economies. That will require difficult choices and different paths for both of our countries."

Also notice his focus on debt, which is a major issue in the US, unlike our debate here on the deficit.

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Number Crunching the Telegraph's figures

Will Heaven has written a lazy blog post post  saying that Conservative efforts at online campaigning and engagement are lakclustre and tame, especially when compared to those of President Obama. Who knows how he would describe Labour online campaigning then, but that's not the purpose of this blog.

He compares the 2,612 people who voted 40,000 times on 1,109 questions on the NHS for David Cameron against Barack Obama’s last use of the Google Moderator tool where 92,937 people voted 1.8 million times on 103,978 questions.

Thats not a fair comparison for a number of reasons, mainly Obama is President of the US not leader of the opposition, secondly his questions were allowed on any topic at all, not just one narrow topic and thirdly the US is a much bigger place.

Let’s compare some adjusted stats. The US has a population of 304,059,724 people with 74% of that being Internet users. The poor old UK has an estimated population of 61,399,118 and 79.4% of us are internet users. So the US internet using population is roughly 4.6 times as large.

Lets also look at the first time Obama used the Google Moderator tool in December 2008  in a pilot where again anyone could ask anything. After roughly 2 days the tool had apparently had 1 million votes by 20,000 people on 10,000 questions.

The conservative tool was open for roughly four days on the NHS so lets scale the first use of it by Obama tool to match our situation in terms of internet using population and number of days

	Obama	Cameron
Votes	434,782	40,000
People	8,695	2,612
Questions	4,347	1,109

Not that bad, considering that with Obama they could ask a question on anything at all. If you think about it policy falls into generally education, healthcare, crime and justice, defence and other (gross simplification I know) so you can divide Obama's figures by 5 leaving us with

	Obama	Cameron
Votes	86,956	40,000
People	1,739	2,612
Questions	869	1,109

Which seems a much better comparison and really just shows that Americans have so much time on their hands they can vote for 50 questions each on average whilst us Brits only have time to vote for 15 at a time!

Updated: With the final figures for the first time use from here

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