Noonan: Over His Head

Peggy Noonan sometimes writes with a lot of feeling, sometimes with cold-eyed analysis. This Wall Street Journal article is one of the latter. In it she chronicles the precipitous decline of the fortunes of the Democratic Party in the 18 months since Obama took office. She says of Obama's dealings with Congress:

Mr. Obama won on more than health care; he won on the stimulus package and the Detroit bailout. And yet his poll numbers continue to float downward. He is not more loved with victory. (snip) The biggest single phrase you hear about him now, and it isn't coming from pundits and being repeated, it is bubbling up from normal people and being seized by pundits, is the idea that he is in over his head, and out of his depth.

If you think about how little experience Obama had before taking office, it isn't surprising. Noonan reflects what I wrote yesterday. The Obama Administration has gone off on tangents of its own choosing, instead of doing what their bosses - the electorate - sent them to Washington to do. Predictably that approach hasn't been popular with said bosses.