THE WORSHIP ENDS - AT 9:18 P.M. ET:  A good way to finish the weekend.  Experienced Washington hand Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times reports that the time of seeing President Obama as some political messiah is passing:

Barack Obama has fallen back to Earth.

When he ran for president, Obama said his election would be "the moment the rise of the oceans began to slow." And when he made his first big foreign trip in April, he was hailed by adoring crowds -- and almost-as-adoring politicians -- in Britain, Germany, France and the Czech Republic.

But last week, in Russia and Italy, Obamania was little more than a pleasant memory. Yes, his international polling numbers are still high, but the president encountered hardly any adulation in the streets of Moscow or anywhere else...

...And the oceans are still rising too. At the Group of 8 summit, the developing countries said no to a timetable to stop global warming, the reason for the waters' rise.

Reality settles in:

The hard reality of international affairs is that, just as the United States has interests, so do other countries. And when those interests conflict, all the charm and charisma in the world can't resolve the differences.

There are even reports that Chris Matthews hasn't felt a tingle up his leg in weeks.  Physicians have been consulted. 

On Iran, which aides said was a dominant subject of the meetings, there was no sign that Obama got the Russians to budge. The U.S. wants Russia to support tougher economic sanctions to push Iran toward giving up its nuclear fuel production. Russia, which views next-door neighbor Iran as both a business opportunity and a local security problem, has no appetite for that kind of confrontation.

"Iran is Russia's important partner," Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on the eve of Obama's visit. "We cooperate and do so very productively." More sanctions "will only deteriorate the situation," he said. And that was his last word on the subject.

The centrifuges keep spinning and the nightsticks in Tehran keep swinging.  There will be a point when the president will run out of conferences.  By that time, though, he may be confronting a bomb, not a theory.

The United States and its allies want Iran to negotiate, but Iran's Islamic leaders, facing challenges to their legitimacy at home, are digging in their heels. The next step, probably in September, is a concerted Western effort to step up economic sanctions against Tehran -- but that may mean a confrontation with Russia and China, which don't agree that sanctions are necessary.

All of which left Obama sounding, at the end of the week, as if he looked forward to getting back to solvable problems -- such as the economy and healthcare. "The one thing I will be looking forward to," he said, "is fewer summit meetings."

COMMENT:  What a mentality.  The president thinks meetings are either a solution or a problem, when it's really facts and attitudes that count.  We recall that Douglas MacArthur once said that all defeats begin with two words:  Too late.  Obama is learning.  But, by the time he comes to the right conclusions and gets himself the right advisers, it may be too late.  What was gained in the Western (i.e. American) victory in the Cold War can slip away.

July 12, 2009