I was both amazed and cynical at what I saw this morning.

Barack Obama, desperately trying to rescue his political fortunes from the sewer, wisely and yet again nixed a press conference and instead sought a friendly environment in which he could be seen "feeling our pain". You can't get friendlier to a Democrat President than a morning show on the unabashedly Obama booster network. Yet NBC's Matt Lauer wasn't throwing softballs, acknowledging for his audience that the criticism the President has received isn't just from the majority hoi polloi in flyover country and the agitators on Fox News, but from left-wing supporters--you know, people who live in New York City and Washington, D.C.

The reporting by Drudge and other conservative critics is a little unfair--Obama is not looking for ass to kick, his supporters are disappointed that he isn't kicking ass and Obama responded in the same vein by pointing out that its not clear at this point whose ass needs the kicking.

The left, in their typical fog or arrogance, self-righteousness and ignorance, have already identified the villains and simply want to throw a rope over the hanging tree. Obama, for reasons both political and practical, knows that this kind of frontier justice isn't wise nor is it possible. For a moment, I felt the briefest sympathy for the President, on whom it is dawning that the White House isn't all photo ops and Air Force One plane rides.

The prevailing thinking on the extinction of the dinosaurs is that it wasn't just one event that wiped them out, but a succession of crises that arrived on the doorstep more or less simultaneously. Its seems that Obama and the Democrats are facing similar circumstances.

Healthcare is actually more unpopular as time goes on. The Sestak-Romanoff scandal has obliterated Obama's credibility as a Mr. Clean, and nearly two months of the Gulf crisis, with no real end in sight, is a political nuclear winter scenario that even the disorganized nest of Republican rodents can ride to dominance.

The Chicago way, which is really just the Democrat way writ large, is all about political finesse, and Barack Obama has mastered that particular art. Nowhere though is there anything in the curriculum about actually governing, and we see countless examples of states, cities and now a federal government that clearly and unambiguously have failed to manage their affairs in the most elementary way.

For a Democrat, Obama is in the worst situation he could possibly be--possessed with the responsibility to solve a problem created by the very institutions he reveres, and bereft of even a contingency plan to deal with any of it. Every day that goes by we have the lesson drummed into our heads that the government that supposed to make our lives a paradise on earth, is totally dependent on a private corporation to solve the problem and deal with the clean up.

If you're a socialist after this, you really are a complete moron.

No, none of the above amazed me, and I did say that I was also amazed. My astonishment derives from the realization that the Obama administration and the Democrats generally, have totally squandered a solid gold advantage in the form of a media complex totally in the tank with everything that they could have come up with. Not only does Obama have to duck the press conferences, but he can't get a safe, high-five interview from Matt Lauer on the Today Show!

Comparisons with Jimmy Carter, confined to readers of conservative websites before and after the election, have now become mainstream.