Everyone knows why Barack Obama became president of the United States.

There was hope, “change we can believe in”, the mobilisation of the youth vote, “yes we can”, a yearning to end the moral squalor of the Bush years and an understanding that at long last the time had come for a black American to occupy the White House.

All that and the small – or not so small – matter of $748 million. Mr Obama may have claimed to represent something new in the public life of the US, but he achieved his goal by observing the oldest American dictum of all: who pays, wins. With donations large and small, each one a vote in and of itself, he outspent the Republicans. Now he means to do it again.

He will seek re-election next year: of course he will. Only by emulating Lyndon Johnson in refusing to claim or accept nomination could Mr Obama have surprised anyone. Like all those who before him who aspired to two terms, he cites unfinished business. There is plenty of that, of course. But this time, just to make doubly sure, the Democrat means to break the bank. Reportedly, the candidate intends to raise a billion dollars.

A figure so staggering, with all that it implies for American notions of representative democracy, can only sound like overkill. It also raises a couple of questions. How much political advertising can you buy before the figures, and hence the campaign itself, become indecent? How can anyone talk of free and fair elections in such a context?

Equally, how worried is Mr Obama? He may have left many of his earliest supporters, the young not least, disillusioned. His party may have suffered a “shellacking” in last year’s mid-term elections. He may have surrendered cherished policies too often without a fight. He may have emerged as the target of near-irrational hatred from American conservatives. But, says the outsider, come on: the Republicans can’t even find a candidate.

That last statement is the simple truth. The American right have obstructed Mr Obama at every turn. They have gloried in policy stalemate, not least over health care, and turned the business of government into a matter of naked self-interest, particularly when demanding renewed tax cuts for the very wealthy. They would dearly love to turf this “socialist” president from the White House. So who seeks that honour?

Silence falls. Bolder souls on the right recall that in this, as in so much else, George Bush was inept. By saddling himself with the ageing, often unwell and deeply unappetising Dick Cheney as vice-president, Mr Bush ensured that he left no obvious Republican successor.

His party meanwhile failed to anticipate or harness the emergence of the so-called Tea Party movement, a populist insurgency that forgot to be popular among sane and non-aligned voters. Those who take the likes of Michele Bachman and Sarah Palin seriously are not taken seriously by the majority of American voters. Ms Palin, cashing her cheques from Fox News, has the wit to understand as much. Short of a political earthquake in the next three months, she will wait for 2016.

All of which leaves a list of individuals who are not, in their turn, taken seriously. There are nobodies: Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels, Rick Santorum. There are proven losers: Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich. There are scary zealots: Ron Paul, the aforementioned Ms Bachman. There is even an outright joke: Donald Trump. But only Mr Pawlenty, former governor of Minnesota, has “declared” and Republicans, says received wisdom, “are depressed”.

Yet Mr Obama still believes he needs $1 billion, as though measuring the loss of his political capital in hard cash. He says the staggering sum is required to protect his achievements. But how much advertising will it take to convince previously supportive voters that those achievements are real?

The military trials of alleged 9/11 conspirators are about to go ahead at Guantanamo, the base Mr Obama promised to shut down. The Libyan intervention has not been popular; Afghanistan drags on; a limited degree of health care reform looks vulnerable still; the housing market is in ruins; and 8.8% of Americans – those who are actually counted – remain out of work.

This Democrat also suffers the Curse of Bush: it remains, as Bill Clinton’s team never forgot, the economy, stupid. Who still remembers that Mr Obama inherited a hellish mess? He may have averted a banking collapse, but that is small comfort in a country where real incomes for ordinary citizens continue to fall. In short, there has been little enough change for anyone to believe in.

All the young people Mr Obama galvanised in 2008 have, beyond question, lapsed into apathy. The Democratic left, as it is termed, is disillusioned with a president who has seemed less cautious than purely timid. Besides, what looked like a landslide last time was actually forged from some fairly narrow wins in states such as Ohio and Florida: nationwide polls tell only part of the story.

Americans tend to re-elect incumbents: so much is in Mr Obama’s favour. But key independent voters – those who are not registered as Democrat or Republican – must be asking some hard questions. Conservatives may not be able to beat this incumbent in a straight fight, but they can obstruct his every move thereafter. As they have already demonstrated, they (and their corporate paymasters) can still get what they want, and may yet demolish those health care reforms. So what is that soaring Obama rhetoric actually worth?

The received wisdom still insists that he will probably win again. What he will not do – for who could? – is revive a dysfunctional political system in which destructive tactics have supplanted strategic thinking, in which stalemate has become the status quo, and in which the going rate for government of, by and for the people just went up to $1bn.

Mr Obama says he wants the chance to finish the job he started. That’s what all the incumbents say. They never explain why the job of government has been left undone. They are too busy campaigning for re-election, most of the time, for that.

Ian Bell also writes at prosperoinc.blogspot.com.