Anything the president can do his opponents can usually do worse – so let's hope Middle America backs Professor Obama and his party tomorrow

US midterms: America, we need you, but we need you sane

I don't quite know why I felt so cheered up to hear about funnyman Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity" on the Mall in Washington, DC, at the weekend. I see as little of his Daily Show as I do of his idiot antithesis Glenn Beck of Fox TV, whose "Restoring Honour" rally was staged in the same place earlier this year.

It's a long thin bit of ground, as malls tends to be, stretching from Capitol Hill to the Lincoln Memorial, and Hadley Freeman's account in today's Guardian suggests the acoustics were terrible for most of the 200,000 people said to be present for Stewart and Stephen Colbert – and the jokes not much better.

But the idea that fewer things divide Americans than fringe extremists (and a cynical chunk of corporate media) try to suggest is a very appealing one, and important as the US votes – or doesn't – in tomorrow's midterm elections. "Maybe you're wrong, maybe I'm wrong – let's grab a beer," as Stewart put it himself. Nice.

OK, it's a platitude, but it's better than the paranoid self-important rages of Beck. I recently read a sympathetic profile of him in the Times and circled alarm-bell words like "depression", "divorce", "alcoholism", "drop-out", and "Mormon" in his CV.

I can understand why lots of people can identify with him and his struggles, as with Sarah Palin and her "Mama Grizzly" nonsense. But they should keep a firm hold of their wallets and votes while doing so: just enjoy the ride, folks, and laugh – which is what you're invited to do watching Jon Stewart.

The US is going through a stubborn recession; falling wages, lost jobs that aren't coming back, and a touch of self-doubt as China's unavoidable rise (do I mean return?) to world power – 300 centuries later than it should have done – makes itself felt even to the most parochial Americans.

Actually no. Someone wrote the other day that Barack Obama tries to engage with the real world and gets punished domestically by voters who cling to a vision of the world as they would like it to be, but no longer is. You have to engage with others, to compromise, to adapt to change.

A great chunk of the US and its citizens are brilliant at all this – proof that Beijing will have to run hard for a long time to catch up. But another great chunk has been left behind, especially during a time when the down side of ascendant free markets opens up the wealth/poverty gap even more sharply – as it always does.

In a country that regards itself as mankind's unique "exceptional" society – built on freedom on an empty continent, so the unquestioning rhetoric goes – the loss of the American dream of self-betterment is hard to take. And part of that dream has always featured hucksters – quack salesmen, hellfire preachers, TV motormouths – willing to talk the poor out of their last dollar, often by blaming someone else for their failure to succeed – blacks, Jews, foreigners or (they're not always wrong) bankers.

If that wasn't enough, we currently have the extraordinary spectacle of a president – a president who is not only black, but liberal and (worst of all) highbrow – who raised voter expectations sky-high two years ago and has disappointed a lot of people.

No, he didn't cause the recession. Yes, it's Republican presidents, one Reagan and two Bushes, who piled reckless debt on future generations with unfunded tax cuts and spending programmes.

But it's Obama who has been inept enough to catch the blame. Gordon Brown caught it too, but he partly deserved it – too much borrowing, not enough regulation – and he was no magic orator with a mighty personal mandate.

A wounding column in Saturday's FT summed up as well as anything I've read this week why Obama and the Democrats look set to be clobbered tomorrow night. Written by Christopher Caldwell, a conservative American writer, it's called: "Why America doesn't do kings."

Caldwell argues that Professor Obama – as I dubbed him the only time I heard him speak in person – is at his "most blunt, honest and incisive when he is speaking to millionaires".

In other words he's an elitist in a country where they do politics populist-style, elect a monarch every four years (a bit like the papacy) but like to regard him as an employee all the same.

Quite right too. That's how I regard the Queen, which is why she doesn't bother me as our hereditary president, not least because she keeps her mouth shut. But Obama doesn't keep his mouth shut and can't or won't do populist. Can't, I suspect.

When he was being ribbed by Stewart on the Daily Show last week I was struck – in the clips I saw – by the way he often kept his eyes down. It's a shifty habit in a politician, though fine in a prof.

Caldwell is more cruel than this. He cites four examples to illustrate how Obama makes himself unpopular with the folk he needs to stroke:

• One was the occasion when he sided with Henry Louis Gates, a black Harvard professor who lost his rag after a cop arrested him trying to break into his own home. You can easily see both sides, but the prof was meant to be the grown-up.

• When he accepted the Nobel peace prize, which, as he admitted, he hadn't yet earned it. Not Obama's fault; those idiot Norwegian prigs dumped on him, but ...

• Michelle Obama's high-profile, heavy-security holiday in Spain when the Gulf beach resorts were suffering from the BP-Haliburton-Transocean oil spill.

• In complaining two weeks ago at a Massachusetts fundraiser that "facts and science and argument do not seem to be winning the day ... because we're hardwired not to think clearly when we're scared."

That's true, but do you say it that way if you are canvassing for votes? I fear I agree with Caldwell's first two points – did here at the time – and can see his Cherie Blair-style third point too, though it's mean.

Bank regulation, healthcare reform, rescuing the financial system ... the president has done many good things in his "yes we can, but" two years. But he still hasn't learned how to govern as a centrist or a populist which is what you have to do to govern the United States.

But anything he can do badly his opponents can usually do worse, as George Bush so often proved. So let's hope that Middle America decides tomorrow that it would prefer an honest prig to some of the shyster rascals offering themselves for office. America, we still need you, but we need you sane.