Maureen Dowd; notoriously partisan and poison-tongued columnist for the New York Times, provides some insight into the emotional life of the professional left these days. Her characterization of Barack Obama would be entirely at home in the National Review.

Barack Obama must wonder sometimes if his luck has run out. Maybe he used it all up in 2008.

"Yes, we can!" has devolved into "Hey, we might."

"When I said, 'Change we can believe in,' I didn't say, 'Change we can believe in tomorrow,'" he told an audience at a Chicago fundraiser on Wednesday.

"Not, 'Change we can believe in next week.'We knew this was going to take time, because we've got this big, messy, tough democracy."

True enough, but not FDR-inspiring to a deflated and desperate nation that may face higher borrowing rates after the shock of the first credit downgrade in U.S. history.

Barack Obama blazed like Luke Skywalker in 2008, but he never learned to channel the Force. And now the Tea Party has run off with his light saber.

The dissonance of his promise and his reality is jarring.

When he had power, he didn't use it. He wanted to be a "transformational" president like Ronald Reagan, but failed to understand that Reagan's strategic shows of strength allowed him to keep the whip hand without raising his voice.

Dowd continues the piece in the mien of a mother explaining to the public that her fugitive son, having committed acts of unspeakable horror, is really a good boy, and that his problems are really the fault of the bad influence of his associates.

The president talks fondly of George Bush the elder, just as Bush the elder does of him. Obama thinks Bush is a poignant figure because he did the right thing, breaking his tax pledge to fix the deficit, even though he got punished for it with one term.

It is clear that the once cocky Obama is feeling that same poignancy about his own presidency. Left in a giant pickle by the hot-dogging Bush the younger, the president who gloriously made history is now stuck in Sisyphus mode.

He thinks he's doing the right things to crawl out of W.'s mudslide, but he ends up being castigated by the right as a socialist, by the left as a conservative, and by the middle as wobbly

Dowd's invoking of the "Bush's fault" mantra at this late date, isn't unique. It seems that every one of Obama's remaining supporters has grasped this same slender rhetorical reed. No one who has witnessed the trillions in new spending, and the remarkable reluctance to cut even a penny of the federal budget can seriously evaluate this crisis as a 'tax problem', but when every problem is a nail, every solution requires a hammer.

Dowd goes on to express hope that Hollywood's retelling of Seal Team 6's taking down of bin Laden will somehow reignite some of the 2008 Messiah magic, but in doing so, it becomes evident that her entire piece is just one slow-motion castration of the President. She confirms every public perception of the President's 'unmanliness' and fatal incompetence with pity, excuse-making and finally, the hope that a metaphorical stay at the Betty Ford clinic can somehow rehabilitate his public image.

The ultimate irony is that she has no idea how bad she just made Barack Obama look.