He could just become the lamest lame duck of all time.Peggy Noonan says that the Democratic establishment is finally becoming alarmed at the strange priorities and ineptitude of the Obama administration:
From journalist Elizabeth Drew, a veteran and often sympathetic chronicler of Democratic figures, a fiery denunciation of — and warning for — the White House. In a piece in Politico on the firing of White House counsel Greg Craig, Ms. Drew reports that while the president was in Asia last week, “a critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes for his presidency began to wonder whether they had misjudged the man.”
They once held “an unromantically high opinion of Obama,” and were key to his rise, but now they are concluding that the president isn’t “the person of integrity and even classiness they had thought.”
She scored “the Chicago crowd,” which she characterized as “a distressingly insular and small-minded West Wing team.” The White House, Ms. Drew says, needs adult supervision — “an older, wiser head, someone with a bit more detachment.”…
Just as stinging as Elizabeth Drew on domestic matters was Leslie Gelb on Mr. Obama and foreign policy in the Daily Beast. Mr. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and fully plugged into the Democratic foreign-policy establishment, wrote this week that the president’s Asia trip suggested “a disturbing amateurishness in managing America’s power.” The president’s Afghanistan review has been “inexcusably clumsy,” Mideast negotiations have been “fumbling.” So unsuccessful was the trip that Mr. Gelb suggested Mr. Obama take responsibility for it “as President Kennedy did after the Bay of Pigs.”
He added that rather than bowing to emperors — Mr. Obama “seems to do this stuff spontaneously and inexplicably” — he should begin to bow to “the voices of experience” in Washington…
The Obama bowing pictures are becoming iconic…because they express a growing political perception, and that is that there is something amateurish about this presidency, something too ad hoc and highly personalized about it, something…incompetent…You can get tagged, typed and pegged your first year. Gerald Ford did, and Ronald Reagan too, more happily. The first year is when indelible impressions are made and iconic photos emerge.
This fellow Obama does not seem to be in touch with what might be called the Americaness of America. The wiser heads in the Democratic Party are correct to be alarmed. We wish they would have awakened sooner.