Noemie Emery reviews the pitiful performance of Barack Obama's young presidency in this D.C. Examiner column. Read it in full right here.Well, that was fast.
On March 20, only two months after the cosmic anointing, Vanity Fair, of all people, unloaded on Barack Obama, in the terms it had reserved for the past four or five years for the likes of George W. Bush.
Well, not the whole magazine, but one of its writers, media writer Michael Wolff, took an axe to the president, in a posting beginning “Sheesh, the guy is Jimmy Carter,” ending “This guy is leaden and this show is in trouble,” and titled “Barack Obama is a Terrible Bore.”
The same day, ex-fan Peggy Noonan called him “insubstantial and weightless...not fully focused...jumping from issue to issue and venue to venue from day to day.” “The administration’s difficulties...have created an unfortunate impression of incompetence,” said The Economist. Politico noted that his skills as a salesman have begun to desert him.
It all came at the end of what Rick Klein of ABC News called Obama’s ‘lost week,’ which got worse on Sunday, when he was attacked by the New York Times in three columns and one editorial. One warned of an oncoming fall of Katrina dimensions. And these were his friends.
Actually, since he was sworn, in most of his weeks have been lost ones, or at least weeks headed downward, the problem being that three or four variations on the theme of incompetence have had time to harden and set...
