JUST AWFUL – AT 8:58 A.M. ET:  A new poll shows a devastating shift in American public opinion that will have horrible effects down the line.  This is the new America in the age of Obama.  From NBC: 

A near-majority of Americans say the United States should become less active in world affairs, a dramatic change from the post-9/11 national environment and one that comes as President Barack Obama tries to juggle crises in the Middle East and the Ukraine.

In a new NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll, 47 percent of respondents said the U.S. should dial down its activity in foreign affairs, versus 19 percent who said the country should be more active around the globe. Three in ten respondents said the current level is correct.

That represents a major flip in how Americans view world affairs since the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. At that time, nearly 4 in ten Americans said they wanted to see more engagement around the world, and just 14 percent said the nation should be less active.

Comparable studies in the mid-1990s found that about a third of Americans believed the U.S. should reduce its foreign policy footprint.

COMMENT:  Why do Americans feel that way?  Part of it is the awful educations they're receiving in our colleges and universities, spearheaded by leftist professors who believe that America is the problem, not the solution.

And part of it is press reporting, which, since the Vietnam War, has disparaged American attempts to resist dangers abroad.  (And where are American journalists "educated"?) 

But the bulk of the change comes, I believe, from lack of presidential leadership.  Citizens in a democracy must be led in foreign policy.  They don't see the effects of that policy around them, as they see the effects of a bad economy.  It takes a bold president to say, "We have a problem.  Here is why it's important.  Here is what I plan to do.  Let me explain why you should support it."

The Obamans say they're giving Americans the foreign policy they want.  That is true.  But they want it because no one is leading in the correct direction.  In a way, Obama has been wildly successful as president, as a man of the left sees success.  He has weakened America, weakened our defenses and demoralized our population in terms of its relation to the rest of the world. 

When a crisis occurs, Americans still react in their traditional manner.  But that reaction quickly fades into a kind of isolationist despair at the hands of Barack Obama.

No foreign enemy could have done the damage that Obama has done.  It is true that some parts of the press have turned on him.  But it is also true that, on America's college campuses, the left has actually been increasing its militancy, not decreasing it.

The damage, of course, extends beyond the left.  Even in the Republican Party there is a new isolationism.  We know how the last era of isolationism, in the 1930s, worked out.  Ask the association of Gold Star mothers.

May 2,  2014