Obama: Is his inexperience showing?

“It’s not easy to waste a mandate and a honeymoon at the same time,” said Michael Goodwin in the New York Daily News. “But President Obama seems determined to try.” Just weeks into his administration, the country’s charismatic young president is stumbling badly. First, he failed to properly vet the “tax dodgers and influence peddlers” Tim Geithner and Tom Daschle. Then he allowed House Democrats to craft his vaunted stimulus plan, turning it into an exorbitant monster swollen with pet spending projects, souring public opinion and “making Republicans relevant again.” Once famously unflappable, Obama now angrily pours “scorn and ridicule” on his many critics. “A president doesn’t have to be able to walk on water,” said Mark Steyn in the Orange County, Calif., Register. But it must be unnerving for Democrats to see their Messiah looking so fallible “after a mere two weeks.”

This is what comes of “hubris,” said Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online. Not content with creating a new New Deal, Obama came into office promising a kinder, post-partisan politics, one in which “Republicans and Democrats, cats and dogs, Klingons and Romulans” could all get along. That warm, fuzzy talk was fine for the campaign trail, said Toby Harnden in the London Daily Telegraph. But Obama is now in Washington, not Iowa. “Making decisions and operating the levers of power is something completely new to him. And it shows.”

Sure, Obama has had “a rocky start,” said Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post. But all things considered, the president is doing pretty well. He pushed his historic stimulus bill through both houses of Congress practically overnight—which in Washington is something of a miracle. Already, Obama has ordered the closing of the prison at Guantánamo and signed major legislation on children’s health care and pay discrimination. Don’t be fooled by all the noise, said Bob Herbert in The New York Times. Obama ultimately got his way on the stimulus package, leaving Republicans with the self-assigned role of rooting for the rescue effort—and the economy—to fail. “Obama is like a championship chess player, always several moves ahead.”

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It doesn’t look that way to most people, said Tina Brown in TheDailybeast.com. Over the past week, “you could feel a dry-mouthed, stomach-knotted apprehension in the national perception of our brave new president.” Was he too green? Was he, as the Clintons once warned, not tough enough? Obama’s most fundamental problem, said Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post, is that he “wants too much to be liked.” To have true authority, a president must be willing to make brutally ruthless decisions, regardless of popular opinion. The young senator from Illinois got to the White House “before he had time to gain the confidence and wisdom one earns through trials and errors.”

Now that his nose has been bloodied, though, said Doyle McManus in the Los Angeles Times, Obama is learning fast. To get the stimulus bill back on track, he strong-armed congressional Democrats to take out spending that was too controversial, and went on the attack against Republicans. His admirers may think he’s some kind of “saint,” but Obama would never have reached the White House had he not been a clear-eyed pragmatist of the first order. In the months ahead, “if his record is any guide, he’ll give up whatever he must to protect the things he cares most about.”