When Brian Cowen blamed his Morning Ireland fiasco on the fact that he was hoarse, he sounded like Heather Mills claiming she had a slight limp. Not that she ever would, of course. Her disability is obvious, just as it was clear to anyone who heard the Taoiseach's pre-breakfast chat with Cathal Mac Coille on Tuesday that he was suffering from the kind of hangover that has afflicted most drinkers on at least a few occasions during our lives, although not thankfully live on the wireless, and not when we were supposed to be trying to prevent the country from sinking into insolvency.

The Taoiseach didn't have a great week, but neither did many of his cabinet colleagues, who felt the need to circle the flagons and lie to the media about their leader's drinking, his performance on Morning Ireland, and about his state of health. By the time various ministers and TDs were finished attributing a variety of ailments to Cowen (a cold, a cough, congestion, a phobia about noisy plates) it seemed that the phrase The Sick Man Of Europe had been invented for the Taoiseach. Chef whip John Curran told us Cowen was always on top of his game in the morning, but Mary Hanafin told us that he wasn't a morning person at all. Nobody was being remotely credible. People were hearing one thing on the myriad replays of Cowen's interview but Fianna Fáil ministers were trying to persuade us that something else was happening. It was a microcosm of the wider debate on the economy. The government tells us our problems are manageable, but most of us see an economy out of control.

This disconnect between what we see and what the government tells us we should see partly explains why there was such a hostile reaction to the Taoiseach's interview last week, but not a year ago when something similar happened.

On 15 September 2009, Brian Cowen gave an interview to Morning Ireland on the occasion of Fianna Fáil's annual think-in in Athlone. The Taoiseach was his usual grouchy, contemptuous self during the conversation with Áine Lawlor. He slurred some of his words, sounded like he'd had a late night and didn't make a whole lot of sense. Inspiration there was none. But he got away with it because, in September last year, a hungover Taoiseach was not a cause for concern.

So why the big change? Why did a slightly worse performance in a slightly deeper voice make news from Chile to China last week? The conventional and easy answer has been that it's all to do with Twitter and its facility for sending opinions out into the universe at great speed where they are legitimised by the slowcoaches, in the old media. But that's too glib and too partial an explanation. Twitter existed a year ago, as did the easily-offended Twits who use it. What's changed is the context in which hungover interviews are done. If the economy was still booming, Cowen's chat with Mac Coille would have received no negative attention at all. People would have marvelled at his capacity to get up for a radio interview after a hard night's drinking. We would have said he was a great fellow altogether, the kind of chap you'd like to meet for a pint and a packet of Tayto. Simon Coveney would have been written off as some kind of po-faced killjoy.

But the country is €25bn poorer and 12 months closer to insolvency since Cowen's Athlone interview, and the idea that the Taoiseach was too busy getting pissed at a Fianna Fáil knees-up to bother preparing for an interview about his plans for the economy caused uproar. Twitter helped, as did our tendency to react negatively to pretty much anything a Fianna Fáil person does these days. But the key factor was our rapidly changing circumstances and the suspicion – dramatically confirmed by Cowen's interview – that the Taoi­seach and most of his ministers are asleep at the wheel, and that the rest of the world knows it.

I wonder if our outrage is misplaced, though, and whether it exists for the wrong reasons. My first reaction when I read the accounts of Cowen singing and joking and mimicking and apparently being quite funny was that it was a pity he hasn't allowed us a glimpse of that human side of him since his early hours as Taoiseach. All we've seen since that famous day when he sang during his homecoming in Clara is a deeply hostile, charmless, impatient and angry man who
believes that voters are not entitled to answers.

There's clearly a bit more to him than that, but it appears to have been overwhelmed by his sense of powerlessness in the face of the many challenges facing him. He simply doesn't know what to do and doesn't have the natural charm or charisma to at least convey a convincing message of hope. The result is a brooding presence, guilty about his role in causing the economic crisis, ashamed of his inability to fix it. Because he can't cope, he drinks too much and because he drinks too much he can't cope. It's a vicious circle, one you could almost sympathise with were it not for the fact that 450,000 unemployed people and their families have much worse to deal with.

Odds are well stacked for obama to win next election

Barack Obama is 8/11 to win the next US presidential election and if I was you, I'd grab a piece of the action now. An €800 return in two years on a €1,100 outlay is way better than any bank will give you these days – and the president should be regarded as the
overwhelming favourite no matter what you might be reading about his current difficulties.

One of Obama's strengths – probably the only one he shares with Enda Kenny – is that he is lucky in his enemies. The selection last week of anti-masturbation headcase Christine O'Donnell to run for the Republican party in the Delaware Senate election in November is the latest sign that the GOP is being taken over by unelectable ideologues with no mainstream appeal. Another is the choice of Carl Paladino – whose main claim to fame is emailing a digitally doctored picture of the Obamas as pimp and prostitute – to run for governor of New York. The Democrats will lose some seats in the November elections (that's what happens to incumbents in times of economic crisis) but if Obama runs in 2012, he'll win.

ddoyle@tribune.ie