She is a young woman who uprooted her life to go the US and fight for the election of Barack Obama - now just over a year into the new president's time in office she is disillusioned and withdrawing her support.
 
Kirsten Verdel was the only Dutch person to work on President Barack Obama's election campaign team. Although she couldn't vote in the United States, she got a job at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington DC where she helped devise the presidential candidate's campaign strategy.

For more than a year after he was elected president Ms Verdel, who is also a freelance journalist, tirelessly defended President Obama in the media. However in an interview with Radio Netherlands Worldwide she reveals that she is "withdrawing her support".
 
Ms Verdel wrote a book about her experiences during the campaign: Van Rotterdam naar het Witte Huis. In het hart van Obama's campagne (From Rotterdam to the White House. At the Heart of Obama's Campaign). She describes the bureaucratic nightmare she had to go through to obtain a work permit. She then became one of the few people who experienced from the inside how the members of the campaign team helped to change history.
 
"During the campaign, Obama was a great source of inspiration," she explains. "Today, the scenario has changed completely. During his first year I defended him on many radio and television programmes. But then I decided to stop defending him, starting with the next interview I gave - this one."

RNW report on a debate involving Kirsten Verdel

Ted Kennedy
Ms Verdel says she is "enormously disappointed" with Obama. The reason for her dramatic change of opinion is the recent loss of the seat of late Democratic Senator Edward ('Ted') Kennedy to the Republicans in the election held recently in the state of Massachusetts following his death last year.
 
Ted Kennedy, who served in the Senate for 46 years, was one of the most influential Democrats in the US Congress. He decided to endorse Obama in exchange for a commitment from the presidential candidate to make universal healthcare a top priority if elected.
 
President Obama's healthcare reform bill has, however, still not been passed, and the loss of Senator Kennedy's seat to the Republicans means the Democrats no longer have the necessary 60-seat 'super majority' they need to force through that bill. It's those 60 seats that are required to prevent the Republicans from sabotaging healthcare bills with filibusters (delay tactics). With the loss of Ted Kennedy's seat the Democrats now have 59.
 
"Massachusetts is a Democratic bastion and Kennedy left an enormous legacy which he would have wanted his successor to continue. However, Obama hardly participated in the campaign [for the Senate seat, ed]. The fact that Kennedy's seat went to the Republicans was the last straw for me."
 
Cooperation and compromise
Kirsten Verdel believes President Obama is particularly to blame because he has taken one of his campaign themes - that you can change anything as long as you bring people together - too far.
 
"He has placed too much emphasis on reaching compromises with the Republicans. But right from the very moment he was elected, the Republicans didn't want anything to do with him. Obama spent a long time trying to reach out to them. Far too long, in my opinion."
 
She believes that, at a certain point, he should have put his foot down and said: "This is how we are going to do it." Even if this might have been difficult to explain to those who considered him the great conciliator in a country divided between rich and poor, Republican and Democrat.
 
Make a clean sweep
Ms Verdel warns that President Obama now needs to "make a clean sweep" and "put his house in order" otherwise he'll be able to add the permanent loss of the support of his former campaign worker from the Netherlands to his recent dramatic nosedive in US opinion polls.