The latter charge will seem incomprehensible to many readers since Mr. Obama is the most leftward president in American history, but be that as it may, toward the end of the piece Weston says what many observers who've been less smitten by his oratory and racial significance have been saying for three years:
A second possibility [for Mr. Obama's failures] is that he is simply not up to the task by virtue of his lack of experience and a character defect that might not have been so debilitating at some other time in history. Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted "present" (instead of "yea" or "nay") 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.Of course, these explanations are not mutually exclusive. The part about an "extremist Republican Party" is nonsense, of course, but the part about Mr. Obama being unable or unwilling to articulate what he believes in, is not. The country, led by a swooning media, rolled the dice on a man they knew nothing about and got a president who appears with every passing day to be unsuited for the job.
A somewhat less charitable explanation is that we are a nation that is being held hostage not just by an extremist Republican Party but also by a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election. Perhaps those of us who were so enthralled with the magnificent story he told in “Dreams From My Father” appended a chapter at the end that wasn’t there — the chapter in which he resolves his identity and comes to know who he is and what he believes in.