Is Obama already a lame-duck president?

After defeats on gun control and the sequester budget cuts in the first 100 days of his second term, President Obama faced pointed questions at a Tuesday news conference about whether he is out of the "juice" he needs to get his agenda through Congress. Obama bristled. "Maybe I should just pack up and go home," he said. "Golly. You know, I think it's a little, as Mark Twain said, you know, 'Rumors of my demise may be a little exaggerated' at this point." Obama said that, instead of criticizing him for failing to get Republicans "to behave," reporters should be grilling GOP leaders about why they won't compromise and "do what's right for their constituencies and for the American people."

The clash prompted some observers to say Obama may be turning into a lame duck just three months into his final term. "A president is in trouble when he's forced to defend his relevancy, as Bill Clinton did 18 years ago," or to quote Mark Twain's famous line about premature obituaries, says Ron Fournier at National Journal. "Not wrong — just 'exaggerated.' Not forever — just 'at this point.'" Obama rightly noted that his power is limited in the face of GOP Senate filibusters, a hyper-partisan House, and polarized media and voters, says Fournier. "But the president risks losing the public's faith when he waves the white flag too often, especially on problems that can be fixed. Blaming the GOP and larger structural problems don't help the country, much less his legacy."

Obama's supporters, however, say it's ludicrous to blame the president for GOP lawmakers' determination to block him at every turn. "Much of Washington is in the grips of what several observers call the 'Green Lantern Theory of Presidential Power,'" says Jamelle Bouie at The American Prospect. The Green Lanterns of comic book fame are a corps of space police, each with a power ring emitting a green energy. "With it, Lanterns can do anything — the only limit is their will," explains Bouie. Deluded journalists expect presidents to have the same fantastic power as super heroes. That's just not so:

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Not everyone, however, buys the argument that uncooperative Republicans are the ones who should be getting grilled for failing to get things done. "Actually, it is [Obama's] job to get them to behave," says Maureen Dowd at The New York Times. Asked about the hunger strike by terror-war prisoners at Guantanamo, for example, Obama said he was recommitting to closing the controversial prison and moving its inmates to a Supermax prison in Illinois, "Gitmo North." The thing is, the prisoners aren't "hunger-striking for a change in scenery," Dowd says. They're protesting unlimited detention without rights, and Obama has no fix for that, which seems to be at the root of his problem overall: