Outside In | Obama v CY Leung: one has a legacy, the other battles the odds for a second chance

Full solar eclipses are not common, but often awesome – not least because of the temporary ability of the moon – such a celestial minnow – to cast us into darkness as it smothers the light from the sun.

But as I sat on Wednesday in the studios of CNBC, awaiting a discussion on Leung Chun-ying’s fourth policy address, I witnessed a fascinating solar eclipse of a political kind: there on one screen was Leung, face to face with a truculent Legislative Council, while on the adjoining screen was US President Barak Obama, tabling his state-of-the-union speech on the floor of the House on Capitol Hill in Washington. Heaven knows when such a political eclipse will ever happen again.

Initially, the contrast was comical – as it must surely be to compare the dull, pockmarked moon with the fiery volatile brilliance of the sun. Leung stood tight, wooden, eyes boring down into his text, jabbering in Cantonese at the speed of a horse racing commentator. The Legco auditorium seemed empty and remote. By contrast, Obama engaged eye to eye, talked leisurely and conversationally, to an auditorium crowded to the gunnels, almost like Steve Jobs would do at an Apple gathering. Despite the partisan differences between Republican and Democrat, applause was frequent, loud and sincere. Leung’s audience was stonily silent, except when the usual dial-a-protest pan-democrats leapt to it until they were bundled out of the chamber for the stony silence to return.

But once the comical contrasts had been noted, some unexpected parallels began to gel. Here were two leaders for whom global recession had provided the depressing backdrop to their entire terms of office, with no prospect of relief for the remainder of their terms of office.

Here were two leaders trying almost without hope to make progress on important issues through political systems that were fatally dysfunctional.

Here were two leaders who had battled in vain to reduce partisan fractures across the political firmament. As Obama formally acknowledged: “It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency – that the rancour and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better.” Gosh, how poignantly could Leung have said that. But of course, he would not. Surely one of Beijing’s keenest and most perplexing regrets is that 18 years after the transfer of sovereignty from colonial Britain, the polarisation of Hong Kong politics remains as extreme as it has ever been – that hardly any of the “doubters” and “sceptics” expecting Beijing to trample Hong Kong underfoot after it resumed sovereignty has shifted ground from those original prejudices.