Did Obama bite more than he can chew?

Has the Obama administration - barely seven weeks old - already fatally crippled itself? The question may seem silly, but it has been the subject of much debate in the United States over the past week or two.

The complaint is voiced both by critics who are sympathetic to the new president and by those who are not: Is he trying to do too much?

Is it really possible to tackle both the American and the global financial crises, fix the country's broken banks, save mortgage holders in danger of losing their homes, remake America's deeply dysfunctional health care system, launch a slew of green energy initiatives, tackle the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, wind down in Iraq, ramp up in Afghanistan and spend a mountain of stimulus money wisely all at the same time?

By taking on every one of the world's ills, while promoting a long - and long-standing - series of Democratic Party pet programmes, does President Barack Obama risk failing at most or all?

Perhaps. But it is also clear that the president understands he has a brief moment in which to work.

This has less to do with the 100-day period that is the benchmark by which new presidents are traditionally judged, than with the calendar that governs US politics.

A British, Canadian or Indian parliament is elected for a five-year term, but governments can fall and new elections can be called at any time. Prime ministers value their ability to set the election day as a key attribute of power.

As a matter of politics this means a prime minister must always be seen to be doing something, to be moving forward with an agenda of some sort.

Nothing undermines the leader in a parliamentary system more effectively than the sense that the government has simply run out of gas.

In contrast, American governments are elected for fixed terms. Neither the president nor anyone else has the power to dissolve the US Congress.

The only way to remove a president before his term expires is through impeachment - a process the framers of the US constitution intentionally made long and difficult to ensure it would almost never be used.

Indeed, in 220 years only three presidents have been seriously threatened with removal from office. Two (Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1999) won their impeachment trials before the US Senate. A third (Richard Nixon in 1974) resigned rather than let the process play out.

Moreover, presidents are limited by the US constitution to two terms in office. Add to that the fact that US presidential campaigns are, to put it delicately, insanely long and the bottom line is that Obama has about a year to work on his agenda before the next campaign cycle kicks in.

He does not need to solve all America's, and the world's, ills in that time, but to keep control of Congress (next year) and be reelected (in 2012), he needs to show that he is making progress.

Complicating things is a kind of hysteria brewing on the far right; one that sees the Dow Jones Industrial Average as a kind of minute-by-minute referendum on the presidency.

Using that standard the political right wing has already declared Obama a massive failure. This despite the fact that recent opinion polls show both Obama and the Democratic party enjoying high - in the case of the party historically high - favourable ratings.

Obama must move quickly. America is an impatient country. People want to see results now, but fixing the economy, as the president recently noted, is like turning around an ocean liner: A slow process.

Is he trying to do too much at once? Perhaps. But trying times call for bold initiatives. Presidents set many things in motion, but remain engaged in few of them on a day-to-day basis.

That is simply the nature of presiding over as huge a beast as the American government. Those who say Obama should focus on a single crisis, say, banks, are well intentioned but miss the point: Doing one thing at a time simply is not feasible.

So the bottom line is that the American president needs to push his agenda through now not only because he has the political backing to do so, but in order to give that agenda time to take hold in advance of the next election cycle. Sooner than we think the calendar, and the next campaign, will take over.

Gordon Robison is a writer and commentator based in Burlington, Vermont. He has lived in and reported on the Middle East for two decades.