Obama: The second coming of Jimmy Carter?

It’s the kind of “internal feuding” that afflicts every administration, said Peter Wehner in PoliticsDaily.com, but it’s still a sure sign of trouble. With President Obama’s poll numbers down and his agenda stalled, “No-Drama Obama Land” is being buffeted by a sudden epidemic of backbiting and finger-pointing. The first sign of rancor came in a Dana Milbank column in The Washington Post, in which Milbank suggested that Obama’s political troubles were caused by his stubborn refusal to listen to Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel is a political pragmatist who keeps urging the president to move to the center. Milbank suggested, in fact, that Emanuel may be “the only person keeping Obama from becoming Jimmy Carter”—which is to say, a haplessly liberal, one-term president. In other stories, sources laid the blame for Obama’s problems at the feet of chief strategist David Axelrod, who is said to be so enraptured by his boss that he can’t tell him when he’s wrong. Uh-oh. “When the knives are unsheathed, with key aides distancing themselves from presidential failures,” it can only mean one thing: This administration is starting to “unravel.”

Obama’s problems stem from one key misunderstanding, said Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. Obama sees himself as a “transformative” president—a liberal Ronald Reagan—and thinks 2008 was a mandate for liberal governance. Emanuel, who learned his politics in the ruthlessly pragmatic Clinton White House, has tried to convince him otherwise. But Obama’s acolytes have prevailed, which is why this White House is about to commit political suicide by trying to force health-care reform on a nation that doesn’t want it. “Only Barack Obama can keep Barack Obama from being Jimmy Carter,” said Jack Kelly in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “But he doesn’t seem so inclined.”

If anything, Obama has been too much of a centrist, said George Packer in The New Yorker. FDR and Reagan were transformative because they had very distinct worldviews, and the public respected their sincerity and their persistence. Obama and his aides always seem willing “to sand down the edges of their own proposals,” making them seem uncertain and unprincipled. What happened to change and hope? said Frank Rich in The New York Times. Obama was elected on the strength of “his ability to communicate a compelling narrative” about his own stirring life story, and about how the country had gone “wildly off track” during the Bush years. But as president, Obama has been mostly a technocrat, with no overarching “theme” to carry him through the inevitable ups and downs of Washington.

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Don’t write Obama off quite yet, said Steven Cohen in HuffingtonPost.com. Abraham Lincoln, FDR, and John F. Kennedy all made major mistakes in their first year in the White House, and they all emerged stronger and wiser. “Running the United States is a really hard job, and it takes a while to learn how to do it.” As Obama demonstrated during his brilliant presidential campaign, he is a very strategic and determined man, and it’s foolish to underestimate him. I have to agree, said William Kristol in The Weekly Standard. Obama is wounded, but we Republicans can’t yet be confident of unseating him in 2012. First, we need to develop a “governing vision for the country,” and then we have to find a candidate capable of defeating him. “For now, a little exhilaration is in order. But only a little.”