Near the front of this week’s Time magazine, Michael Elliott writes a little too fancifully of how “unregulated” and monstrous America’s capitalist economy is to European socialists:

Obama still has his fans in Europe and still knows how to charm them. In London for the G-20 meeting of leading economic powers, he met the Queen and had the British press–for whom celebrity is as appealing as garlic to a vampire–eating out of his hand. (Some of the hacks surreptitiously took pictures with their cell phones as he spoke.)

But when you’re President of a nation whose unregulated, red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism is widely blamed for an economic crisis that is making life miserable for millions, star wattage will get you only so far.