"Obama a One-Trick Pony"?

Powerlineblog posts a long and thoughtful piece by a professor at Hillsdale College analyzing a recent Peggy Noonan column on President Obama.

The Noonan column and the professor's analysis gives voice to many on both the Right and the Left who wonder whether Obama has the skills, depth or interest in governing as he campaigned.

In Noonan's words:

Mr Obama is in a hard place. Health care hangs over him, and if he is lucky he will lose a close vote in the Senate. The common wisdom that he can't afford to lose is exactly wrong--he can't afford to win with such a poor piece of legislation. He needs to get the issue behind him, vow to fight another day, and move on. Afghanistan hangs over him, threatening the unity of his own Democratic congressional base. There is the growing perception of incompetence, of the inability to run the machine of government. This, with Americans, is worse than Obama's rebranding as a leader who governs from the left. Americans demands baseline competence. If he comes to be seen as Jimmy Carter was, that the job was bigger than the man, that will be the end.

The Hillsdale professor (who often finds Noonan's gauzy, moralizing writing style off-putting), thinks Peggy Noonan is spot on this time. He concludes with his own observation--that Democrats are sowing what they have reaped:

[In 2008, the Democrats] had on their hands an inexperienced, recently minted US Senator from Illinois who was -- as Joe Biden put it in a candid remark that typifies his propensity for speaking his mind without first thinking about the consequences -- "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." Never mind, they thought, Obama's long-standing connections with William Ayers, the unrepentant mastermind of a domestic terrorist bombing campaign in the 1970s. Never mind Obama's close association with the racist demagogue Jeremiah Wright. Never mind his lack of executive experience, his unfamiliarity with the private sector, and his ignorance of the ways of Washington. With the help of the pliable press, he could be sold -- and Americans would congratulate themselves on their lack of racial prejudice if they voted for him.

Now comes the reckoning. For Barack Obama seems to be a one-trick pony. He is very good at delivering a speech if he has a teleprompter at hand, and the first and even the second time that you hear him, you will be impressed. If you bother later to read and re-read the speech you will perceive its emptiness. But few will do that, and by the time that they do, it will be too late.

My take on all this is that it must be very tough to be a Democrat loyalist these days. We conservatives knew what we were getting with Barack Obama, and are surprised only by the scale of his arrogance and the emptiness of his politics. Liberals are just discovering that the man they swooned for as a candidate can't or won't deliver what he promised them.

Imagine how disappointing the next three years is going to be for them. And the worst part is, they can't admit it to anyone. Not even themselves.