Obama: Is the president a wimp?

Barack Obama’s presidency has “undergone a dramatic downsizing,” said Glenn Thrush and Carrie Budoff Brown in Politico.com. Weakened by the moribund economy and stymied by an unyielding Republican opposition, Obama has in recent months lost “power, popularity, prestige, and ambition”—as a slew of polls this week confirmed. His approval ratings have sunk below 40 percent, and more than 60 percent disapprove of his handling of the economy. More troubling still is the fact that less than 50 percent of voters now believe Obama has “the right set of characteristics” to be president. Given his grandiosity in 2008, the contrast is startling, said James Taranto in WSJ.com. This is the same puffed-up politician who trumpeted his victory as the moment “when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal.” Now the savior of planet Earth looks frustrated and agitated, as he continually whines that those mean Republicans are making his job difficult. “Like a leaky balloon, Barack Obama keeps getting smaller.”

Obama’s problems can be traced to one central fallacy, said Cenk Uygur in Salon.com. The president and his advisers believe that he’ll win re-election only if he convinces independent voters he’s a reasonable centrist open to compromise. But Obama is dealing with Republican leaders who are not remotely interested in compromise or problem-solving, and who will try to humiliate him at every opportunity—as they did when they forced him to delay this week’s jobs speech before Congress. As usual, Obama swallowed that insult, just as he backed down on the debt-ceiling standoff and the battle over eliminating the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Compromise is fine, but “here’s what all voters, and especially independents, despise and disdain in a politician—weakness.” It’s starting to look like we’ve got a wimp in the White House, said Michael Tomasky in TheDailyBeast.com. “When will Obama ever utter fighting words?”

It was almost inevitable that Obama would prove to be a disappointment, said William McGurn in The Wall Street Journal. When this untried political neophyte moved into the White House, his soaring rhetoric and theatrical stage management “all seemed to herald something exciting and historic.” But on issue after issue, from the massive federal budget deficit to unemployment to the need for tax reform, he has “proved himself incapable of matching his grand rhetoric with grand actions.” Where’s the substance? Where’s the courage? “Three years into his presidency, the grander the stage, the smaller Obama comes across.”

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A bit of perspective, please, said Jonathan Chait in The New York Times. At the beginning of his presidency, Obama used up his political capital on two very grand pieces of legislation—his health-care-reform package and the $800 billion stimulus. But contrary to current liberal “magical thinking,” all presidents have limited power, because in our system Congress is a “coequal branch of government.” And Republicans in this Congress have deliberately tried to sabotage every major element of Obama’s agenda, correctly calculating that deadlock would make him look weak and ineffectual. Given the GOP’s ruthless opposition, and the rotten economy over which he has little control, Obama is a president with a pretty typical case of the third-year blues. That’s not much consolation to those who expected more, said Maureen Dowd, also in the Times. “The leader who was once a luminescent, inspirational force is now just a guy in a really bad spot.”