"President" Obama - The outcome of magical thinking

Observers of all stripes are noticing that the Obama Administration is really rather incapable of getting things done or coping with the many challenges that come at a President on a daily basis.  I quote at length from Jim Geraghty's Morning Jolt:

In a piece headlined, "White House Political Team Stumbles, Bumbles," Politicodeclares, "They toppled Hillary Clinton, crushed John McCain and managed to get the first black man elected president of the United States. But now a series of recent missteps just keeps getting worse for Barack Obama's political operation, already under fire from inside the party for losing its golden touch. . . . One senior House Democrat said it is baffling 'how one group of people can be so good at campaigning and so bad at politics' -- a phrasing nearly identical to that of a second veteran House Democrat who expressed the same sentiment. Lawmakers say the White House seems capable of handling only one issue at a time -- a stunning contrast to the candidate whose campaign promised that he could 'walk and chew gum' at the same time in 2008. Now this senior House Democrat said he's worried that the White House isn't able to handle multiple major challenges. 'They're paralyzed,' he said. 'It potentially loses the House.'" The conservative blogosphere's response to Politico's surprised discovery can be described as "Duh." At Red State, Moe Lane contends that Team Obama was actually pretty overrated at basic politics, too: "The White House spent ten months and double-digits' worth of House seats (latter payable November 2010) to pass a hideously unpopular health care monstrosity when it already had a lopsided majority in Congress. The White House has killed the electoral hopes of every post-2008 candidate that it's personally intervened for. The White House can't even get the card check and cap-and-trade bills out of neutral. And as it stands right now, thanks to this administration's priorities and goal achievement strategies the Democrats are planning to run in November on . . . the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Which I had to look up, too -- and I'm a political junkie who has written about it. So why are people so surprised that this administration is awful at politics, too?" Bruce McQuain, writing at Q and O, is on my wavelength: "We're now suffering the results of irrational thinking when it comes to electing a president. Timing and 'historical moments,' coupled with good campaign theater should never replace the careful consideration of the bona fides of any candidate for office -- even at the lowest level. But all too often it does, and, such as in this case, we suffer the consequences. The question, of course, is will we do what is necessary, as soon as possible, to correct the mistake? Or will we again be swept away by the hype and spin and glitz of the one thing this group seems to be able to manage?" I'm not going to go on my trademarked ten-minute rant that Barack Obama rocketed to the heights of political power without ever doing that much. Mydrop-the-coffee-cup-because-you've-identified-Keyser-Soze moment of the 2008 campaign was when I read the words "Just what's he done? I mean, what's he done?" That's what Rep. Bobby Rush said in a debate with then-state legislator Barack Obama when both men were competing for the Democratic primary for Rush's seat in 2000. Rush won the primary, 61 percent to 30 percent. Barack Obama has racked up some accomplishments since 2000, but just ten years ago, Democratic primary voters in Illinois' First District -- a district that included Hyde Park -- agreed with Rush's assessment that Obama was insufficiently accomplished and experienced to represent them in the U.S. House of Representatives, never mind the presidency. The supposed competence of the 2008 campaign largely reflected Hillary Clinton's flaws as a candidate (and the fact that she had been in the public spotlight, almost nonstop, since 1992), the nation's obvious exhaustion from the previous Republican presidency, a horrific economic downturn, and a media that decided early on that Obama was the reincarnation of Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, and FDR rolled into one and would not be persuaded otherwise. The Obama they adored never really existed.