Hussein Obama’s Poll Numbers

Obama's poll numbers these days.

He's bleeding on every front. The latest Pew survey shows that only 38 percent of Americans approve of his handling of the economy. In the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, fewer than half of respondents (48 percent) say Obama can be trusted to keep his word. Gallup has his approval rating at a new low of 52 percent, and Rasmussen has it below 50 percent for the first time.

On almost every domestic issue, polls show that support for Obama and his agenda is plummeting, and that the Democratic Party's advantages over Republicans on the economy, taxes, the deficit and health care have been erased or severely reduced.

All presidents go through rough patches, and Obama's no exception. Odds are his poll numbers will get better -- and worse -- in the years to come. All of this is typical.

But this misses a crucial point: Obama isn't supposed to be a typical politician. He was supposed to be The One. He was supposed to change Washington. Transcend race. Fix souls. Bake 12-minute brownies in seven minutes.

Oprah promised Obama would help us "evolve to a higher plane." Deepak Chopra said Obama's presidency represented "a quantum leap in American consciousness." Last month, Newsweek editor Evan Thomas proclaimed that Obama stood "above the country, above -- above the world, he's sort of God."

His messianic hopey-changiness has been exposed for what it was, and what it could only be: a rich cocktail of pie-eyed idealism, campaign sloganeering and profound arrogance.

Indeed, the one unifying theme of his presidency so far has been Obama's relentless campaigning for a job he already has. That makes sense because that's really all Obama knows how to do. He's had no significant experience crafting major legislation. He has next to no experience governing at all.

But he's great at giving speeches, holding town halls and chitchatting with reporters. So that's largely what he does as president. The problem is that campaigning is different than governing. The former requires convincing promises about what you will do; the latter requires convincing arguments for what you are doing. He's good at the former, not so good at the latter. Or as columnist Michael Barone puts it, he's good at aura, bad at argument.

Now, just as critics predicted, Obama needs on-the-job training to become a president, because he's a god no more.