NOONAN NAILS IT – AT 9:12 A.M. ET:  Peggy Noonan has been pretty sharp recently, and today she writes one of her best columns on Obama, zeroing in on this president's bizarre notion of governing.  From The Wall Street Journal:

I don't see how the president's position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president's political judgment and instincts.

There was the tearing and unnecessary war over his health-care proposal and its cost. There was his day-to-day indifference to the views and hopes of the majority of voters regarding illegal immigration. And now the past almost 40 days of dodging and dithering in the face of an environmental calamity. I don't see how you politically survive this.

The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They're in one reality, he's in another.

Wonderfully stated, and entirely accurate. 

And...

What continues to fascinate me is Mr. Obama's standing with Democrats. They don't love him. Half the party voted for Hillary Clinton, and her people have never fully reconciled themselves to him. But he is what they have. They are invested in him. In time—after the 2010 elections go badly—they are going to start to peel off.

But word of caution:

But Republicans should beware, and even mute their mischief. We're in the middle of an actual disaster. When they win back the presidency, they'll probably get the big California earthquake. And they'll probably blow it. Because, ironically enough, of a hard core of truth within their own philosophy: when you ask a government far away in Washington to handle everything, it will handle nothing well.

COMMENT:  A column worth reading. 

The president is indeed out of touch.  Just as important, he seems bored by the job.  He seems to get no joy out of it.  He seems not to like his own country or its people.  He's president of us, but he's not of us.  His role model seems to be Jimmy Carter, who lectured us about our "inordinate fear of Communism" just before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.  Obama lectures us on the evils of Arizona, and on our inordinate fear of terrorism, just as a bomber tries to blow up Times Square.

Jimmy Carter lives in retirement, and, like Obama, adorns himself with the Nobel Peace Prize.

Retirement.  Now there's a role model for the current president.

May 28, 2010