Hard questions confront Barack Obama wherever he looks. To make things worse, as soon as the new president and his team have designed what they think is good policy, they have to sit and watch Congress take it apart. In most aspects of domestic governance, Mr Obama’s reward for victory in the campaign is not power – not commensurate to his heroic exertions, at any rate – but the right to negotiate with legislators. He must have wondered more than once this past week whether he was wise to want the job.