NO LEADER HE – AT 10:12 A.M. ET:  The press coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign was one of the lowest moments in modern American journalism.  The media abandoned all pretense of neutrality and went in the tank for a small-time Chicago politician with a golden voice.  No serious questions were asked of Barack Obama.  He was the dream-come-true of the sixties generation, which dominates the media:

Now we know what that election created.  Arthur Herman, the distinguished military historian, takes Obama apart and declares him a non-leader, a conclusion more and more Americans seem to be reaching themselves.  From the New York Post: 

Polls show that President Obama's Libya intervention has the lowest public support of any US military action in three decades. That's not surprising, because Obama seems ambivalent about the enterprise himself. Whatever he says tonight to rationalize it, Americans are learning a sober truth.

America's chief executive isn't simply one step behind events in Libya; he seems determined to miss a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the free world in the Mideast.

From Tunisia to Iran, the region is in the midst of a democratic seismic shift as autocracies old and new, friend and foe, rock on their foundations. Like most earthquakes, it has no predictable direction. The motives for those in the streets run from wanting a less repressive government and lower taxes (what set the whole thing off in Tunisia in the first place) to religious fundamentalism and sheer boredom.

A Ronald Reagan or a Harry Truman would realize that this is a chance not only to foster a freer and more open Mideast but also to bolster America's long-term strategic interests -- perhaps even cut off radical Islamism at the knees.

Instead, we have a president so determined not to be George W. Bush that he has preferred to lapse into total passivity. Even worse, he seems to see his passivity as helpful restraint, when it is just the opposite.

And...

If anyone wanted the world to see America as weak and unreliable, this is how to do it.

So whatever Obama says tonight to answer our doubts about Libya, there's another more pressing question he needs to answer.

What if anything will you stand up for, Mr. President?

COMMENT:  Ouch.  That is not an endorsement.  Wouldn't it be nice to have a president who believed in his own country?  Truman and Reagan are two examples, cited by Arthur Herman, who did.  They produced important results.  This president is producing another election campaign.  As one pundit wrote, he's a good speaker but a poor communicator.

He'd make a great student-body president.

March 28, 2011