It's very clear the scales have fallen from Peggy Noonan's eyes. Caught up in the Obamania during the 2008 elections, Mrs. Noonan is now once again making sense:

Dear Mr Cameron, welcome young friend. Welcome to America. Bring your bright, dashing self to our shores. Speak your piece with affection and modesty and go home a wiser man.

As for your own leadership, here is some advice. Do not imitate Mr Obama. He has been a disappointment; learn from his mistakes.

Here are the things he got wrong. In the middle of an economic crash, and in the middle of record-breaking federal budgets and budget deficits, Mr Obama started a new entitlement. This struck people, by which I mean almost everyone, as off-point. We are in a crisis, part of the crisis involves spending money we don't have, and our answer is to spend more? It wasn't a policy, it was a non sequitur.

Moreover, the President's decision to focus his entire first year on health care, when the voters were focused on the economy, on unemployment, on deficits, demonstrated, in the end unhappily for him and frustratingly for his fellow citizens, that he simply wasn't thinking about what they were thinking about. In a high economy this might have been forgiven if he'd been generally understood to be a visionary. But he didn't come across as a visionary – "We will go this way, the path may not be clear to all but I can see the sunlight through the hills beyond." No. He came across as a detached academic who believed in abstract notions he'd picked up in the faculty lounge.

To make it all worse, just before he went down the health care pass, he put forward, and saw passed, a stimulus Bill that shockingly – I am not being ironic – could not draw the support of a single Republican congressman. Not one. He should have done everything he could, made whatever painful compromises, to garner just a little grouping of Republican support. He needed a Bill he could claim as bipartisan.

Instead, he and his geniuses in the Democratic caucus in Congress decided to do it their way, get the Bill they wanted, and paint the Republicans on the Hill as mere obstructionists – "the party of No". But being the party of No to Obama/Pelosi came to look pretty good pretty fast, and the President united the Republicans in opposition. Before his first year they'd been at each other's throats; now they were at his. He forgot to keep his foes confused.

Most seriously, he neglected to hold the centre. He came to be seen, and again it's reflected in the polls, as a leader who governs from the Left. But at a time when America feels torn up in many ways, a president who held on to the Left and Right and stood in the centre was what was needed. And the institutional Left is barely grateful: he gave them as much as he thought he practically could and they bang their spoons on the highchair none the less.

Finally, he confused business with Wall Street. No one likes Wall Street after the crash, even Wall Street. They're all dyeing their hair and going to art shows down there. But business? Everyone in America is in business, they want favourable conditions, a sympathetic environment, they want a president who takes steps that encourage them. Or who at least has a sense of what the hell they do.

It's the faculty-lounge problem again: people in business deal with real things, people in faculty lounges deal with ideas, abstractions, theories; they're swayed by this school of thought and that; they're macro. Businessmen must be micro: "Hey buddy, I'm trying to open a dry cleaners over here!"

Sage advice.