OPINION:While even sceptics delighted in the sight of the White House's first black family, the tiny stage of the Stormont Executive stayed silent, writes Fionnuala O'Connor
YOU CAN make excuses for politicians who fail their supporters, since divining hopes and fears through the ballot box has a tinge of magic. No wonder practitioners can become euphoric, or lunge the other way and lose their nerve. A rough business: but essentially exciting, or it should be. The excuses and explanations for Belfast's inert politics are as tired as the audience.
As American pollsters tried to ward off disaster in the run-up to Barack Obama's victory by listing every possible skew-factor and while even sceptics delighted in the sight of the White House's first black family, the tiny stage of the Stormont Executive stayed bare and silent.
President-elect Obama has already worried the clearsighted and is bound to disappoint the most starry-eyed, but his victory lifted hearts around the world. Mere rhetoric, say cynics. Almost five months into the Stormont stalemate, the rhetoric of change alone would be delightful.
Anti-climax rather than riot on Belfast streets has been the best outcome of the past month. Peter Robinson's first DUP conference as party leader spread little chills of disillusion rather than interest.
People who would have shone at the ancient art of Kremlinology - when the cut of a black overcoat or a bulky Zil limo's position in a cavalcade could be decoded to rate who stood where at the top of old-style communism - worked hard at reading the big Robinson moment. They found faint squiggles of meaning in his words and scraps elsewhere, needing goodwill by the gallon to lend them significance.
So it was said to be a sign of pragmatism that speakers "ramped down" references to the Sinn Féin counter-protest against the Royal Irish Regiment parade in the centre of Belfast, rather than ramping them up.
It was thought to be good that jibes were aimed at Gerry Adams rather than Martin McGuinness, since that surely denoted recognition that attacking the Deputy First Minister might make it harder for the First Minister to work with him.
The Sinn Féin president, on the other hand, is nicely separate from the Executive, since he holds no ministry, which makes Adams not only good value but also fair game. (As to the DUP leadership notion that the two republican leaders differ about policy, the kindest name even well-wishers give to that is fantasy.)
But it is a growing problem that talking up the prospects for powersharing calls for industrial quantities of kindness and constructive criticism. These are not qualities for which either party in the stand-off is famous. They expect a lot from the external agencies who pushed, pulled, wheedled and bribed today's Stormont into existence - as they do from commentators, regularly chided for daring to question bona fides or effort.
Neither the DUP nor Sinn Féin sees the need for appreciation in return, or at least a degree of protective self-awareness. It may be a truism to everyone else that Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern cared for Stormont as their baby, an affection probably not shared by Gordon Brown and Brian Cowen. The stalemated duo in Stormont Castle behave as if they have dues to call in and can still depend on the kindness of strangers.
As the shape of a Robinson leadership emerges, it becomes more difficult to sustain belief in a process that always strained credulity, but which was worth supporting as so much better than the alternatives. Dissect the chicken entrails and decipher the hieroglyphs as best they can, and the keenest students come up against too little that is cheerful, too much that is stingy and mean-spirited. It may be, as some have thought for years, that Robinson long ago lost the ability to stop being a deputy and start being a leader. There was nothing in his first address to a party conference to suggest the vision some supporters had said earlier he must outline now, or be seen as at the mercy of events.
The hopeful decided on a small cheer for what they deemed to be the main Robinson message: that his party would not be walking out of devolution. As an exercise in positivism, this may be fine and dandy. Is it sufficiently solid to be called politics?
Republicans may fret internally at the persistence of their own dissidents, but they rarely make the mistake of allowing their anxiety to halt their own programme for more than short periods.
It is increasingly clear, on the other hand, that anxiety about criticism from MEP Jim Allister runs all the way to the top of the DUP. It has begun to look as though it paralyses the supposed new leadership, also damagingly distracted by the tensions between Nigel Dodds, Gregory Campbell, Jeffrey Donaldson and Sammy Wilson. Perhaps Robinson is indeed the new David Trimble, despite all the scorn he ladled over the harried Ulster Unionist leader - who bought into powersharing but either could not or would not sell it.