With five days to go to the elections, polls including those by RealClearPolitics give Barack Obama a comfortable chance of becoming the next president of the United States. It is well-known that were Europe able to vote, polls would be barely worth a glance because an Obama landslide would be a certainty. But for all the current flush of romance, a president Obama's long-term relationship with Europe may not live up to expectations.

Those expectations are high, and they go beyond the way that crowds in European capitals were captivated by Obama's message of change in his tour of the continent this past summer. Those expectations transcend the fact that Europe looks forward to a US president who is Not Bush - and by the way, just the fact that the next president will not be Bush may not prove enough.

Probably the most inspiring exposition of Europe's expectations was expressed in a scintillating speech at Harvard in September 2008 by European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso. He told his audience that he had in his pocket a letter to the next president of the US, whoever that may be. The letter, which runs to about five pages, spells out a vision of hope for a new-era relationship between the EU and the US.

Barroso underlines that the EU is a global player and a natural ally of the US. He explains their joint weight in the world economy, in trade and world finance, international organisations, the management of world security and in development aid.

"But in these times of uncertainty, the EU needs the US and - yes - the US needs the EU more than ever."

There is an unequivocal call for careful co-ordination given the degree of interdependence of the two economies. "On both sides of the Atlantic, we must maintain open and dynamic financial markets to ensure the reliability of the overall economic system and to drive growth and jobs" - a point that Barosso follows swiftly with a warning against protectionism, a warning not ill-founded given the initial reactions from both Obama and John McCain as they sought to offer their respective directions for the US in the post-bailout, almost certainly recession-weighted world.

Barroso makes a call for a new multilateralism, "not only desirable but necessary", citing first climate change and then peace and security as examples where such multilateralism is called for. On security, noting that added to the threat of radical Islam is authoritarian state capitalism willing to show its assertiveness (a reference easy to apply to Russia). "This is a time for cool heads, not Cold War," Barroso says. Outlining what he sees as the achievements of the EU on issues such as the Russia-Georgia conflict over south Ossetia, the EC president says that in a complementary manner to Nato, the EU is also increasingly and with recognised effectiveness, acting to bring peace and security through a range of crisis management tools.

"So if I ask you to listen and work more with the EU on peace and security issues, it is because the EU has done much in recent years to make itself worth listening to."

Barroso concludes with a call for an "Atlantic Agenda for Globalisation" (a terminology somehow reminiscent of Roosevelt and Churchill's Atlantic Charter but somehow not reminiscent of McCain's "League of Democracies", the Republican senator's comic-book hero solution to foreign hostility). "We should…set an agenda of common action for a new multilateralism that can benefit the whole world."

Oh, were it that simple.

The global financial crisis, or as it has been suggested of late, the global economic crisis, has brought together the current president of the US, EC president Barroso and Nicolas Sarkozy, whose France currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU, for Camp David discussions that could almost serve as a preview of what a new relationship between the US and the EU could be.  It verges on trite to mention that Europe, watching the moment on the Camp David lawn, may have preferred to blur its eyes so as to superimpose, behind the podium on which the seal of the president of the United States is emblazoned, the face of Barack Obama.

But first, it may be pointed out that the Camp David meeting was not quite the isolated event, convened in desperation, that it may have seemed to be. For all his trough brimming with foreign policy disasters, Bush in his second term has been doing better in relations with Europe. There has been an enhanced maturity, not least thanks to the efforts of Sarkozy and German chancellor Angela Merkel, among others. Nor should it be forgotten that since 2005 there has been an agreement in principle between current secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana that the US and EU should enhance their co-operation wherever they can. However politically useful it may be for Obama and "maverick" McCain to paint US relations with Europe, among others, as an unmitigated disaster, that is not quite the case, although that is not to deny that Trojan work remains to be done to get matters on to the level they need to be.

A lot of work. A president Obama or a president McCain may shut down Guantanamo, may even be systematic in coming up with a sustainable exit strategy for Iraq. There may even be progress in reconciling the US and the EU on climate change, an issue on which Barroso correctly has pointed out there is less than no time to lose and which is an issue of primary importance to Europe, a concept that the US under Bush has not seemed quite able to grasp.

Yet the departure of Bush will not simply translate into better relations. Domestically, there will be high expectations on a president Obama to move fast to implement his formula for energy independence, and it is an open question whether his plan would gel with the European vision; although for that matter, there is a somewhat lesser chance that the McCain-Sarah Palin formula for America's energy future would be well-received in Europe.

For that matter, the very same global economic crisis that has brought together the US and Europe to try to plot a way forward has the potential for future tension, especially given that a president Obama might well resort to measures tantamount to protectionism. What domestically may be seen as a necessity is unlikely in the extreme to be looked on with favour by, in Barroso's term, is the US's "natural ally", its partner in Barroso's "Atlantic Agenda for Globalisation".

Further, it is not as if time is on anyone's side. A president Obama would take office only in January, and his administration would settle only after some time, after the process of confirmations of cabinet and other office-bearers. It should not be assumed that a Democratic-dominated congress, as those some polls tend to indicate it will be, will necessarily give president Obama a free pass, a fast track to implementation. And further, Europe itself will not have all of 2009 at its disposal. Summer next year sees elections for the European Parliament, and the workings of European institutions require that the appointment of the EC president must take into account the results of European Parliament elections.

Once all this exercising of democracy is out of the way, there is yet another dimension, and that is that the next US president may well shift emphasis in relations with Europe to rebuilding ties with Western Europe, and could in effect take for granted the strong relations built in recent years between Washington and much (but not all) of Eastern Europe.

It is doubtful that a president Obama could ever fumble relations with Europe so badly as to descend to the level of unpopularity that Bush has on the continent. Yet, the risk of delay, and possible disillusionment, is there. As time goes by in the first term of president Obama, there may be disillusionment, although not the derision of which Bush is the target.

There is one consolation, though. Unlike Palin, McCain or that Action Man doll of contemporary Republican politics, Joe the Plumber, no one in Europe is ever likely to call president Obama a European Socialist.