Columnist Peggy Noonan has given President Obama a great deal of slack in the first year and a half of his presidency, but with this essay titled "He Was Supposed to be Competent" she seems to be reaching the end of her patience. She writes:
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.
Noonan has joined James Carville, Maureen Dowd, and a host of other erstwhile Obama supporters who wished to see him do well but who are coming to the conclusion that he's out of his depth.
It's a bit surprising, actually, that Mr. Obama's lack of competence is a surprise. Mr. Obama was elected to the presidency largely on the strength of his support among the least educated and least mature members of the electorate: minorities and students. He brought no qualifications whatsoever to the office, he had no accomplishments to speak of, but rather than focus on his dearth of practical experience, a delinquent media chose instead to obsess over Sarah Palin's short-comings. As Rush Limbaugh never tires of pointing out, President Obama is the least qualified person in any room he enters.
Perhaps the nation has learned an important lesson: The presidency is too important to entrust to someone simply because his election would make sociological history, or because, despite a paucity of reasons to believe him, he promises to turn America into the new Jerusalem. One hopes that we've matured beyond electing people on the basis of style rather than substance. One hopes.
RLC