THE STRANGENESS OF OBAMA – AT 10:46 A.M. ET:  Peggy Noonan, once President Reagan's speechwriter and yet a supporter of Obama when he ran for president, clearly has regrets.  She's gotten increasingly sharper in her criticism of Obama, and is dead on in this, from The Wall Street Journal:   

I don't know if we sufficiently understand how weird and strange, how historically unparalleled, this presidency has become. We've got a sitting president who was just judged in a major poll to be the worst since World War II. The worst president in 70 years! Quinnipiac University's respondents also said, by 54% to 44%, that the Obama administration is not competent to run the government. A Zogby Analytics survey asked if respondents are proud or ashamed of the president. Those under 50 were proud, while those over 50, who have of course the longest experienced sense of American history, were ashamed.

We all know the reasons behind the numbers. The scandals that suggest poor stewardship and, in the case of the IRS, destructive political mischief. The president's signature legislation, which popularly bears his name and contains within it the heart of his political meaning, continues to wreak havoc in marketplaces and to be unpopular with the public. He is incapable of working with Congress, the worst at this crucial aspect of the job since Jimmy Carter, though Mr. Carter at least could work with the Mideast and produced the Camp David Accords. Mr. Obama has no regard for Republicans and doesn't like to be with Democrats. Internationally, small states that have traditionally been the locus of trouble (the Mideast) are producing more of it, while large states that have been more stable in their actions (Russia, China) are newly, starkly aggressive.

That's a long way of saying nothing's working.

Which I'm sure you've noticed.

And...

It is weird to have a president who has given up. So many young journalists diligently covering this White House, especially those for whom it is their first, think what they're seeing is normal.

It is not. It is unprecedented and deeply strange. And, because the world is watching and calculating, unbelievably dangerous.

COMMENT:  Read the whole piece.  It's terrific.  And Noonan's last point is especially important – journalists believe this is normal, and it really is not.  They think it because they were poorly educated in elite schools and because they're members of a profession that worshipped Obama when he ran. 

Obama was worshipped by journalists because they'd been taught that race, gender, and ethnicity were the main ingredients in life and history.  It's a very distorted view.

July 5, 2014