Analyzing Obama: the Half-Measure of a Man

Here is a blurb:

The President looks like a man who is ridden by events; at just the moment when the nation craves a strong leader, the President looks weak, dodgy, uncertain.  The contrast with the inflated hopes that an untested and inexperienced Senator Obama did so much to build up is crippling.  Obama has fallen so far precisely because he and his supporters so hugely oversold him. 

...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. 

...This repeated lunge for the sour spot — the place where costs are high and benefits are low — now seems to be a trademark of the President’s decision-making style.  On the left it is earning him Carter comparisons from people like Eric Alterman; on the right it means that despite his compromises and yielding of significant ground he continues to feed the incandescent hostility of his bitterest foes.  Worst of all, it suggests to people abroad and at home that the way to manipulate this “split the difference”, consensus-seeking President is to raise your demands.  If you are going to get something like 50 percent of what you ask for, ask for twice as much as you really want.  And with this Presidential style, the squeaking wheel gets the grease.  Not surprisingly, all the wheels have begun to squeak. 

Here is the paradox we face:  The President is a consensus-seeker whose decision making style rewards polarization and a conciliator who loses friends without winning over enemies.
The President’s problem is not, I think, that he seeks compromise.  It is that the type of compromise he chooses is so ineffective.  

Read the whole thing.