HANSON ON OBAMA'S DECLINE - AT 10:39 A.M. ET:  Victor Davis Hanson can always be counted on for a perceptive look at what's happening.  He comes through again, commenting on Obama's decline in the polls, and, I think, in public esteem generally:

I think the Obama presidency is going to encounter far more public skepticism than one would expect in the usual post-honeymoon political adjustments. Why? Because our president often acts and talks as if he were at war with what we might loosely call “human nature.”

There is a growing collective recognition that things simply do not work the way Obama thinks they do. They may in the hothouse at Harvard Law School or in the charade of Chicago politics, or among young, hip bloggers right out of Yale, but not necessarily in the larger American landscape or the real world abroad.

And...

First, Obama’s budgetary agenda defies common sense. If it were true that the United States with impunity could borrow $2 trillion this year — and, in the aggregate, run up another $10 trillion in collective debt over the next eight years — then the rules of finance as we know them would be rendered null and void.

And...

Second, there is likewise a spreading feeling of doubt about our foreign policy. All Americans like to be liked — and like to think they are confident enough to admit mistakes. But Obama is beginning to be predictable, boring even, in his once sincere, but now serial apologies about America’s past and present — to almost everyone from Latin Americans and Europeans to Turks and Muslims in general.

And...

In the perfect world of the university lounge, perhaps such noble things transpire. But most Americans suspect that gratuitous magnanimity can earn contempt as often as appreciation. Like serial borrowing, a tab comes due.

Finally...

Americans are waking up to the fact that their president says, promises, and does things that simply do not make sense, at odds with what they know of human physics — with the predictable nature of the way humans have conducted themselves for centuries...

...Because Obama is a revolutionary who seeks to overturn 50 years of doing business in America both at home and abroad, his shortcomings have the potential not only to diminish his own stature through unmet impossible expectations, but to take all those who signed on to his megalomania down with him.

COMMENT:  The fear, of course, is that a great deal of damage can be done before this kind of revolutionary theorizing is finished.  Some observers make the point that a number of Obama's changes will become impossible to dislodge because large chunks of the public will become dependent on them.

We used to say that America could stand four years of a bad domestic policy, but that four years of a bad foreign policy could be fatal.  That remains true.  If Obama botches Iran or North Korea, the result could be the loss of an American city, or more than one, via nuclear weapons smuggled in or sailed in deep in the hold of a cargo ship.

The stakes are high.  Americans are waking up.  They always do.  Now it's take to put an alarm clock next to the ears of snoozing journalists.

July 13, 2009