The Tea Party Convention in Nashville is generally being reported as a wonderful outpouring of populist fervor. Wonderful if you like populist fervor, which some, like Andrew Breitbart--do not.

WorldNetDaily Editor-in-Chief Joseph Farah used his Friday night dinner speech at the Tea Party convention to “raise questions” about the President Obama’s citizenship, much to the disgust of other attendees, including Andrew Breitbart. “It’s self-indulgent, it’s narcissistic, it’s a losing issue,” Breitbart told one of Farah’s minions, his frustration evident.

Breitbart is overreacting, which he seems to have a tendency to do. The so-called Birther conspiracy is rather benign within the Tea Party movement, serving more like icing on the cake of generalized dissatisfaction that a serious strategic proposition.

Farah on on the other hand, can't seem to grasp the fact that whether Obama is or is not a citizen of this country by the technical letter of the law as it was written in the early 1960s, is completely irrelevant at this point.

Let assume that the birthers are right, and Obama is in fact a Nigerian citizen with no legal standing in the U.S. Think of that fact as bullets that you can shoot from your pistol at a car speeding past you. As the car approaches you from the distance, its too far away for an effective shot, but as it gets within 50 yards (workable pistol range), the car's angle is changing very quickly. You have a fraction of a second to take proper aim and fire your weapon at the driver. If you miss or hesitate, the car is already speeding past you and every fraction of a second that passes reduces the probability that you can hit the driver.

There might have been a time and place where the fact could have 'killed' the Obama campaign, perhaps at the moment he filed papers to run for President, or shortly before, but as the campaign rolled on and he began to rack up delegates, the car was well down the road.

Obama is President of the U.S.A. What are you going to do? Convince a majority Democrat Congress to remove him from office? Even if Republicans won majorities in both houses of Congress this fall, such a move on a popularly elected Chief Executive would set an extremely dangerous precedent and seriously destabilize the country. The balance of power would swing wildly into Congress's direction because they would now have the power to change any President they didn't like for the most trivial of reasons. Do you truly dislike Obama more than you like the constitutional principle of balance of powers?

Think of this as an argument with your wife (or husband). You may be right, but what will you 'win' by insisting on the acknowledgment of your 'rightness'?

That's right...there are larger issues at stake, and sometimes that means you defer an argument to a more auspicious time.

MARK ADDS: I hope Mick will put up with me contradicting him in the body of his own post.

1. The real issue is not whether Obama was born a US citizen, but whether he can or will show that he was born in the USA as apparently specified in the Constitution and amendments. This is not trivial. It disqualifies Schwarzenegger who once looked highly 'papabile', it might have disqualified McCain, it would disqualify some future Churchill who's mother was American and it disqualifies 2 of my children, I guess. What The Framers framed is by definition consequential.

2. I have no doubt that Obama is a US citizen, but if he weren't, then he'd be Kenyan or British rather than Nigerian.

3. The importance of the issue does not swing only on the proximate political fallout, which I read as your main argument. The importance is historical. When a more dispassionate future reviews the passionate now the question will be "How the hell did this fraud become president?" America has pretty much rumbled after only a year that Obama is at best a fraud in terms of competence but, much worse, a functional Manchurian Candidate in terms of policy. An historical understanding of the Obama Derangement Syndrome that got him to President needs the truth about his literal qualification to really suss how the con was done - else the con will morph and recur in trickier shape still.

4. 'Birtherism' is ready made for kooks so rational conservatives like you or Hawkins would shy away from it, but I am not a kook (I'm not a kook, I'm not a kook I tell you) but even if I am, you might re-read Andrew Non-kook McCarthy's piece referenced in my post 'I, Birther.'

MICK REPLIES: I rather enjoy being contradicted--thus are discussion born.

1. You might want to look at how the definition of "natural born" has changed over the years. All my children were born abroad, and their births registered (as John McCain's was...), and thus in spite of their 'foreign' births, they are considered to be natural born rather than naturalized. The statutory law surrounding the specific terms under which a foreign birth is considered to be a natural born, has changed over the years, which is why I referred to the law at the time of Obama's birth. One of the main birther arguments is that he didn't meet the strict requirements of the law (although there is no proof this was the case...) As I pointed out--that 'bullet' would have been deadly at the time Obama was filing papers, where his legal ineligibility would have been problematic. At this point though, having been elected, the election ratified, the President sworn in, etc... birthers would destroy the constitutional house to get at the statutory termite.

That in the end was my main point--the constitutional issues to accommodate the birther desire that Obama be removed from office, would in effect destroy the separation of powers. It would set a precedent where Congress could remove just about any President they didn't like on the slightest excuse (an a technical violation of birth abroad registration is the 'slightest excuse)

2. Well I have to ask--is Obama a fraud because he may not be natural born, or is he a fraud because he misrepresented himself during the campaign? If we are going to sticklers for the historical record, then we have to be sure that our own motivations are clear and above board. The Democrats are paying the price for the so-called 'fraud'--that much is already clear. In any event, the historical lessons of Obama derangement syndrome won't prove useful, because the generation that has learned the lesson will be replaced with fresh, easily deluded meat. The sensible action is to check each candidate's qualifications with a fine-toothed comb--that means a new media dynamic--with funding.

3. The left's name-calling has utterly no effect on me, and I'm not saying you have to be a kook to wonder about Obama's minimum qualifications to be President--I in fact have and will continue to wonder, and for the reasons outlined in the birther post you linked to--Obama's own response has been extremely suspect. Yet there is nothing that can be done at this point to shed more light on the subject, and nothing to be done that help anymore than Obama's profound incompetence isn't already doing.

What I am most concerned about is the environment in which a far-left radical narcissist with no experience in running anything, could actually be elected to become the President of the United States. Whether he is or is not natural born is inconsequential compared to the other more salient facts that the media actively ignored as part of the conspiracy to deceive the American voter.

How do we fix THAT!

I'd say we've made a good beginning in establishing an alternate news media and now a truly grassroots political movement. Citizens have to get off their duffs and run their country. There is an enormous amount of work to do still.

That's moving forward. Birtherism is navel-contemplation.

Dave's 2 cents: I have no more reason to doubt President Obama's citizenship then George Bush's. The birthers haven't produced any evidence and barring a question at the time of filing the campaign documents, if I was Obama now, I'd tell the birthers to stuff it about producing a birth certificate. As Mick points out, the time for questioning has long gone - or are we going to dig up the birth certificates of every past president to see if they really were born in the US too? And if we can't find one for them, what then?

Constitutionally, this birther controversy is akin the move to disqualify Dick Cheny as George Bush's VP since the constitution disallows the president and vice president to come from the same state (Dick Cheny was living in Texas at the time of his nod - and presumably a Texas resident). This was easily overcome because the rules for determining state residency are pretty much non-existent.

I don't see removal of Obama from the presidency the goal of most birthers. Rather it gives them a reason question his and the government's legitimatcy. This is similar to the left howling George Bush was illegally installed as President by the Supreme Court in 2004. Such grievances may come in handy for disaffected groups if they decide to pen a new Declaration of Independence, but that's about it. It requires more than lawyers to make a declaration of independence stick.

I don't know why I am ashamed by Obama's insults to the Dalai Lama; I'm not even American and he's equally contemptuous to my country. But I am.

Maybe the Dalai Lama is the wrong religion. Maybe Obama wants to appease China. Probably both.

Altho the Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, can be a bit of a twit on political theory, his holiness and symbolism exceed those of any other living leader despite having the Nobel Peace Prize. Americans who see their President treating him with disdain may weep to recall that the Dalai Lama holds the Congressional Gold Medal....like George Washington. It makes me angry to write it, but the Dalai Lama would be the last to take offence. He'd see it as no problem or Obama's problem.

The mystique of the Dalai Lama in the psyche of adventurous boys of my generation is hard to overstate. 'Seven Years in Tibet' by Heinrich Harrer is a sensational story guaranteed to make a boy head for the mountains; I stress the book not the movie. In part it deals with the moment when remote Buddhism met modernity and modernity's monster in the attic, communism. That tragedy is personified by this man whom Obama puts out with the trash.

When one day Obama is awarded the Nobel Prize for Phoniness and the Prize for Narcissism and the Prize for Appeasement, let there be added a Nobel Prize for Gracelessness. Then let the medal's mould be smashed.

Sherpas are Tibetan Buddhists who emigrated across the Himalayas to Nepal 300 years ago. Their strength, bravery and sense of fun were qualities I read about as a boy and found to be real when I first climbed in the Himalayas. As a palate cleanser here's a picture of my friend, DaGombu Sherpa, in front of the Everest massif:

Obama is useless, as in soup-to-nuts useless and then some. The "and then some" means wrecking America's alliances and emboldening America's enemies. Has he no friendships with foreign leaders? Britain? Fuhgeddaboudit, that romance is swimming with the fishes. France? Sarkozy looks down his distinguished nose at Obama's "virtual" foreign policy to Iran and says so at the UN. "Zut alors! 'oo eez ze surrender monkey?" (while refusing troops for Afghanistan). Where are the African leaders fêting Obama? Indonesia? Nope. India? China? Nope, nope. Venezuela? Iran? N. Korea? Brazil? Russia? Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.

People are starting to notice and this piece attracted this comment:

Obama’s problem is that most other world leaders are not empty suits but people of some accomplishments. As these leaders have met and assessed him as of no consequence, in effect agreeing with Bill Clinton that Obama is little more than a coffee boy elected via celebrity syndrome, they have little interest in him and he realizes that he is not of their caliber either. Consequently, once past the pleasantries and the weather, neither has much to say to the other.

Re that earthquake in Hawaii:

• It's true, Hawaii and Haiti both have 2 i's.


• Obama may have been born in Hawaii, so it seems peculiar that he'd confuse it with a different one of the 57 states, but, look, he hasn't been back there for nearly 3 months.


• He claims that the great Hawaii Earthquake of 2010 will be covered for federal aid because of the Louisiana Purchase in his Healthcare Bill, but it won't because that provision is explicitly limited to Louisiana, which makes sense because it was an La. senator's vote being purchased, not the vote of Senator Papa Doc Duvalier from Hawaii.


• So this isn't just a lie, it's a multi-layered, nuanced, Harvard Law School, Potemkin Village, alternate reality, supercallifragilsticexpialidocious, Krakatoa of a lie....an Obaman lie.


• All together now, to the tune of The Star Spangled Banner: "WHAT IF BUSH HAD SAID THIS?"

It's a few hours before the House votes on Obamacare. All the mood music is that Democrats will muster the 216 votes, probably by inducing defections from Stupak's small group of anti-abortionists. If by a miracle this disgusting bill fails, let it be remembered what Obama is and why his Presidency failed in its signature legislation: Obama is The Abortion President, the man who wriggled, squirmed and lied to deny 'healthcare' to babies who survive abortion.

Daniel Hannan has written a mea culpa: "I admit it: I was wrong to have supported Barack Obama".

My comment:

Sorry that this sounds snooty, but your post is better analysed by a psychologist than a bloggologist. To touch on one claim - "Obama was dealt a rotten economic hand." No, he was a major promoter and beneficiary of Fannie and Freddie, the CRA and mega-Government which are the principal causes of what went wrong. Obama is the poop, not the scoop. That was obvious all along, so that someone of your excellence (I mean it) could only have been self-duped. That is what you need to acknowledge - that you wanted Obama to be the One for psychological motivations which met at the intersection of many other self-dupes' motivations.

You're Obama. You've never run anything. Your world's changed from hosannas to catcalls and embarrassed silences.

Tomorrow, right after greeting a liberal hero, the lesbian high school student who sued to bring her girlfriend to the high school prom, you dress down a military hero, Gen. McChrystal, a man you loathe and fear from a caste you loathe and fear. He probably clings to his guns and his religion. If you don't fire him for voicing his disdain, you'll look weak. If you do fire him you'll lack a scapegoat for losing 'the good war' in Afghanistan.

The Gulf oil catastrophe is right royally fubarred. Today a judge overturned your 6-month ban on deepwater drilling, citing the Executive's falsification of an expert report. No-one believes you're competent or constructive in this crisis, not even your media groupies who are making rat-like squeaking noises as they abandon ship

Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona, seems horribly self assured and combative about squishing Eric Holder's lawsuit against Az for trying to enforce federal immigration law while Arizonans are regularly murdered by illegals. Some say you wage war against a US state under siege soon after Biden and Pelosi and Holder stood to applaud the Mexican president who disses that state in the Congress of the United States.

Senator Kyl (Az) says you told him directly that you won't protect the border unless Republicans agree to 'comprehensive immigration reform'. You call him liar. He calls you liar.

You've pissed off the left wing, you've pissed off the right wing, you've pissed off RINOs, you've pissed off the military, you've pissed off the UK you've pissed off Israel. There's no compensating respect from China or Russia. Iran and Venezuela mock you.

Your budget director is quitting after 18 months. Your chief of staff is strenuously denying that he'll leave later this year. Your Secretary of State only stands to gain by the implosion of your career. Congressional candidates don't want you to campaign for them.

There's a meme out there that you're an alien in the White House, another that you're out of your depth, another that you're embarrassing America with your limp-wristed foreign policy, another that you're snakebit, another that you'd rather golf than govern.

You've lost authority in the world, in America, in Congress. What next? A face-off between Iran and Israel? Rahm rejoins the IDF? Even the Hollywood jews desert you? You win the Nobel Prize for worst president?

As a gambler I'd look for a turnaround except that character is destiny and your character is defined to me by your suppression of bills to protect survivors of abortion. You, sir, are a disgrace and deserve any mental anguish that comes your way. Maybe you'll emerge changed and shame my lack of charity. We start from where we are, so if your character transcends my reading and you suffer, struggle, mature and prosper…well, God bless you and good luck. But my reading is that you are one dead parrot.

The wheels are coming off.

Of 749 self-identified employees of ABC, CBS and NBC who gave money to Obama or McCain, 710 contributed to Obama's campaign and 39 to McCain's campaign. That is 95% were Obamans.

But Jake Tapper of ABC reports:

During a hastily-called Rose Garden event during which the sound system failed him, President Obama attempted today to communicate to the American public that his administration remains on top of the economic crisis. ... The event in some ways could be seen as a metaphor for the administration’s flailing on the economy. Originally no remarks were scheduled, then on Sunday evening, the White House announced the president would make remarks in the Oval Office after his economic daily briefing. Then on Monday that was upgraded to remarks by the president at 12:30 p.m. ET in the Rose Garden after his briefing, signifying a more formal event. Then those remarks were pushed to 1 p.m. Finally the president approached the lectern at 1:20 p.m. Only five sentences into his remarks, the P.A. system fizzled. “What we did know was that it took nearly a decade -- what we did -- how are we doing on sound, guys?” the president asked “Is it still going to the press?” he asked, checking to make sure even if he couldn’t be heard clearly in the Rose Garden, broadcast networks were getting clean sound, which they were. “OK,” the president said. A plane flew nearby, drowning out his voice. “What we did know was that it was going to take nearly a decade in order for -- can you guys still hear us?” Reporters nodded.
   
“OK,” he continued, “let me try this one more time.”

Today Obama will take credit for ending the US combat presence in Iraq, a successful outcome due to Bush forcing thru the surge against domestic opposition on all sides:

Obama denies Bush the credit, which brings us to a punchline from Powerline:

One can debate whether Obama is a terrible President--I think he is--but I don't think anyone can deny that he is an unmanly jerk.

Obama isn't a muslim. He's an anti-neocolonialist, Islam-acculturated President who is way out of his depth. Becoming political kryptonite must be all the more harrowing for an affirmative action super-hero. Good. I wish him ill. My disdain turned to ill-will when I learnt of his active and crucial role in denying help to babies who survive abortion. Instead they die on a shelf, de-hydrated, panting, without a hand to hold or a voice to bless. That is the essence of this man. He did that.

Still here's some interesting stuff that came up - How Obama Thinks by Dinesh D'Souza:

Theories abound to explain the President's goals and actions. Critics in the business community--including some Obama voters who now have buyer's remorse--tend to focus on two main themes. The first is that Obama is clueless about business. The second is that Obama is a socialist--not an out-and-out Marxist, but something of a European-style socialist, with a penchant for leveling and government redistribution.

These theories aren't wrong so much as they are inadequate. Even if they could account for Obama's domestic policy, they cannot explain his foreign policy. The real problem with Obama is worse--much worse. But we have been blinded to his real agenda because, across the political spectrum, we all seek to fit him into some version of American history. In the process, we ignore Obama's own history. Here is a man who spent his formative years--the first 17 years of his life--off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa.

What then is Obama's dream? We don't have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father's dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. Obama isn't writing about his father's dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father.

So who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself.

An odd choice, certainly, as an inspirational hero. But to his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. Obama Sr. grew up during Africa's struggle to be free of European rule, and he was one of the early generation of Africans chosen to study in America and then to shape his country's future.

I know a great deal about anticolonialism, because I am a native of Mumbai, India. I am part of the first Indian generation to be born after my country's independence from the British. Anticolonialism was the rallying cry of Third World politics for much of the second half of the 20th century.

The climax of Obama's narrative [in Dreams From My Father] is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father's grave. It is riveting: "When my tears were finally spent," he writes, "I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America--the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in Chicago--all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father's pain."

In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that "I sat at my father's grave and spoke to him through Africa's red soil." In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father's spirit. Obama takes on his father's struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.'s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.'s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son's objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father's struggle becomes the son's birthright.

Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man in the White House. He is the last anticolonial. Emerging market economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment.

But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father's time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father's dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.

I've lacked the blogging mood lately. One reason is travelling. Another reason is certain shadows in the lives of people I know. Another reason is that Obama and the Democrats are now acknowledged as useless by pretty much the whole world. That battle of ideas is won. Now the main event is the tension between what I dub the bluebloods and the redbloods on the right.

That said, I hereby make the contrarian forecast that Obama will act against Iran, probably by greenlighting and abetting an Israeli airstrike. A weak president, taunted by his own party as deficient in testicles let alone fortitude, will be sorely tempted to overcompensate. Good.

A whle ago I wrote:

"Birther" is the name given to someone who wants Presidential candidates to show that they are 'natural born citizens' as required under the Constitution. The name is meant to carry the connotation of "Truther", someone who understands that the Truth about 9/11 is that Bush and Cheney bombed the Pentagon. In the same way "Climate Change Denier" carries a bad smell across from "Holocaust Denier."

Conservative opinion formers like NRO, Powerline, John Hawkins have reflexively dissociated themselves from the audacious idea that Obama is not a natural born citizen, but the tenor of rational commentary by the readers of these articles is that something smells bad. Perhaps the readers feel less peer pressure on this charged subject.

Now the esteemed Andrew McCarthy has revised his stance in a must-read article, "Suborned in the USA." The point of McCarthy's article is that Obama is acting like he's ineligible.

He is shown to have lied materially in his autobiography and to have produced a [2007 computer print-out] certification of live birth which means nothing.

He is asked to permit Hawaii to release a routine document often required for business throughout US life in order to show that he is a legitimate President under the Constitution - the certificate of live birth.

Now we have this in the LA Times - "For Hawaii governor, discrediting anti-Obama 'birthers' is a top priority" - and this in the NY Tines - Hawaii’s Governor Takes On ‘Birthers’:

[Hawaii Governor,] Mr. Abercrombie, 72, said that although he did not see the elder Obamas at the hospital with their newborn son, he did remember the couple bringing the baby to social events. He says the critics who suggest that Mr. Obama’s mother slipped off to Kenya to give birth are engaging in a “demonological fantasy.” And he is angry about legislation in several states that would require presidential candidates to document that they were born in this country. A similar bill died in Congress last year.

“My thought was, ‘Wait a minute, why didn’t you ask me, my friends in the national Congress, the House of Representatives?’ ” he said. “They know me, they know that I was here, but they didn’t even bother to have the courtesy to do that, which is disappointing to me, because it is very difficult for me not to conclude that bills like that are meant as a coded message that he is not really American. My thought is, rather than get into some kind of argument or play into that mentality, why not just simply try to authenticate this and let the facts speak for themselves?”

My thought is, rather than get into some kind of argument or play into that mentality, why not just simply try to authenticate this and let the facts speak for themselves?

Priceless. Matthews asks the revolutionary question "Why doesn't Obama just release his birth certificate?" to which the liberal journalist answers "because he's too busy." Suddenly the issue is going mainstream. I don't see how this genie gets put back in the bottle.

Going nowhere fast:

But the speedometer reads 60...

From MARK:

Apologies, Dave, but my comment won't upload so I'll tack this on:

Nice metaphor.

The bottom line is that Obama's suppressing his birth certificate. That makes no sense and can only be defended by bluster.

It's undeniable that Drudge, Limbaugh, Matthews, Abercrombie etc constitute 'traction' in the news sense. If states adopt a law to require a birth certificate to get on the ballot in 2012, then that constitutes 'traction' in the political sense. This seems much more likely since November.

Then, if he produces his birth certificate - end of story. If not, he's 1-term.

So my metaphor would be the Titanic approaching the iceberg.

DAVE ADDS:
Mark no problem on your comment. I've got some additional thoughts, which I'll add later.

LATER ADDITION - below the fold

It's not surprising when your enemies have nothing good to say about you, but when your friends speak of your failings with sadness in their eyes, you should probably take stock and maybe consider some time in rehab.

Walter Russell Mead is such a friend. Not only is a he a serious man, one of the country's leading experts on foreign policy, but he's a Democrat and voted for Obama. His critique, soft in tone, but devastating in it's faint praise, seem to capture the essential flaw in this administration's political style.

President Obama is now passing through what one must hope for both his sake and ours are the worst moments of a presidency no longer young. Abroad, the intervention in Libya has not had the quick and clear results he had hoped. While things may still go well, and one devoutly hopes that they do, US prestige is deeply engaged in a confused civil war in which all NATO’s firepower has been unable to turn the tide. As British and French advisers on the ground struggle to mold the rebels into an effective force and the allies thrash around to develop a politically responsible and accountable rebel leadership, the military’s lack of confidence in the civilian strategy is palpable.

At home, the President has been wounded both by his successes and his failures. Colin Powell referred to the US victory against Saddam Hussein as a “catastrophic success”; President Obama now has a couple of those of his own. The economic stimulus package aroused a fear on the hustings and, increasingly, in the bond markets about the looming fiscal catastrophe. The health care bill, an achievement the President expected and believed would cement both his place in history and a new era of liberal Democratic hegemony in American politics, continues to weaken the administration; the patient is not (yet) accepting the transplant.

The situation in Libya was not hard to predict. I know, I predicted it, and I've never been to Libya, but I do know from recent history and historical experience that insurgencies are not one-and-done. I thought intervention in Libya was necessary, and I predicted that it would require special forces to train a militarily-inexperienced rabble to mount an effective, and long-term resistance to Khadafy's mercenary force. Obama's public salesmanship of U.S. intervention was rather typical of his style--long on promise, short on realism. Syria? That's another post entirely.

The President's reflex to ignore the complexities and scale of effort is understandable when you consider that he hasn't actually done anything in his life that prepared him for the role of estimator-in-chief. This is quite remarkable when you consider that most people in rather common jobs, learn how to come in on-time and under-budget. An automobile mechanic who kept you car an extra two weeks and charged several times the initial quote, would not stay in business long. The implication is clear--we elected a man less qualified to run the country than a successful garage owner.

Mead amplifies and extends this judgment.

We are starting to get to know this President a little better, and his chief besetting fault is increasingly clear: the President falls between stools. He is a man of half measures, a man who spends so much money hedging his bets that he loses even when he wins.

Time and again the President angers one side without conciliating the other. His public demand that Israel agree to a complete settlement freeze as a condition for peace talks alienated Israelis (and not just supporters of Prime Minister Netanyahu); his subsequent back peddling humiliated and angered the Palestinians. He pleased no one, fumbled what he had once proclaimed a crucial priority of his administration, and is left with reduced influence with both sides.

Recently, in a New Yorker Magazine article about Paul Krugman, the latter characterized Democrats being all about policy, while Obama was all about politics. A rather typical misapprehension for Krugman on both sides of that assertion, but Mead keenly observed the true character of the President.

By instinct, President Obama is not a politician. >The President, like many other bright Ivy-educated lawyers, views the world through a legalistic prism, one that underestimates both the power and legitimacy of political considerations in the administration of government. Closing Guantanamo and trying KSM in Lower Manhattan seem both obviously necessary and unambiguously good to the legalistic mind. The ward-heeling politician knows better. This lack of instinctive appreciation for the crooked pathways of the political mindset (a characteristic President Obama shares with Woodrow Wilson) further undercuts the President’s ability to play the political system like a true virtuoso.

Usually, national catastrophes take the form of invasion or defeat in war. Barack Obama's election appears to be one of those rare historical instances where national catastrophe took the form of putting the wrong man into power at a critical juncture. Adolph Hitler and Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte of France were both leaders whose personal failings had long-lasting effects on their respective nations, but more sobering is the reality that something dysfunctional in the national character put those men where they were. We can survive Obama, but can we in fact survive who we've become as a nation that elects such a clearly deficient leader?