What happened to President Obama? His wax wings having melted, he is the man who fell to earth. What happened to bring his popularity down further than that of any new president in polling history save Gerald Ford (post-Nixon pardon)?
Charles Krauthammer then goes on to list the mistakes that have been made, which include, but are not limited to:
**Farming out his agenda to congress (which recent polls show a majority already think is too liberal- Rasmussen)
**Delivering the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president
**Misreading his mandate
**Enlarging state power, government spending and national debt
**Obama supporters calling any opponent of Obama's agenda "misinformed, misled, irrational, angry, unhinged, bordering on racist"
**Cutting backroom deals with every manner of special interest -- from drug companies to auto unions to doctors -- in which favors worth billions were quietly and opaquely exchanged
He concludes:
After a disastrous summer -- mistaking his mandate, believing his press, centralizing power, governing left, disdaining citizens for (of all things) organizing -- Obama is in trouble.
Let's be clear: This is a fall, not a collapse. He's not been repudiated or even defeated. He will likely regroup and pass some version of health insurance reform that will restore some of his clout and popularity.
But what has occurred -- irreversibly -- is this: He's become ordinary. The spell is broken. The charismatic conjurer of 2008 has shed his magic. He's regressed to the mean, tellingly expressed in poll numbers hovering at 50 percent.
For a man who only recently bred a cult, ordinariness is a great burden, and for his acolytes, a crushing disappointment. Obama has become a politician like others. And like other flailing presidents, he will try to salvage a cherished reform -- and his own standing -- with yet another prime-time speech.
Krauthammer cuts to the heart of Obama's fall from grace and dwindling approval ratings, elequently , no further commentary necessary.
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