Obama flails and fails and those who anointed him are puzzled

An irresistible force is meeting an immovable object on the field of perception, and causing an odd sort of storm. The irresistible force is the growing idea that Obama has failed as a leader on a number of items: "Engagement" has failed; our allies are angry; the oil keeps gushing, his ideas are job killers; the recession goes on.

His party lost three big elections under his guidance and seems poised for a drubbing. The harder he pushes the country's laws leftward, the more its politics bend to the right.

David Brooks says, without fixing blame, that Obama has blown the most promising hand ever given a president. In the Hill, A.B. Stoddard is even more caustic: "Seventeen months into office, Obama is increasingly isolated -- from his party, from American voters, and from the world." People are losing their faith in his leadership, he is "so toxic in battlegrounds" that he cannot campaign for his candidates. "The country is more polarized than ever and Washington is even more a target for voter anger than it was under President Bush."

The immovable object is the conviction on the part of some who are also his critics that he is the smartest man who has ever held office, and is therefore too brilliant to fail. Citing his "shimmering intellect," Richard Cohen is at a loss to explain why he hasn't done anything with it.

"Obama, for all his brilliance, has no real, felt understanding of management structures," says Tina Brown, describing the failure to handle the oil disaster, without explaining what, beyond talking, Obama has been brilliant at. He can talk up a storm (though of late this has faltered), but so far his shimmering intellect has led him to think that aggressors can be tamed by making concessions; that he should expand the welfare state just as it is proving unworkable (and very unpopular with the American people); and into replicating to an exact degree every mistake made by George W. Bush in handling Katrina in 2005.

Jonathan Alter blames this on Bush, while Cohen calls Obama a "sphinx," and blames his unsettled childhood. No one advances the more likely conclusion: That Obama seems so much like their idea of brilliance that they assume it of him without too much evidence; or that their perception of brilliance -- often no more than a verbal facility -- isn't much use in the world.

Nor are degrees from the very best places.