As his Presidency runs into increasingly rocky and oily waters, the debate has now begun in earnest about whether Barack Obama is a struggling President, a poorly understood President, or an already-failed President. I give my take on this issue in my weekly Cagle.com column. Here’s the beginning of it:
Some political talking heads and pundits are increasingly using the political-kiss-of-death phrase “another Jimmy Carter” to describe President Barack Obama’s rocky Presidency.
Carter never recovered from his “malaise” speech – a word he actually never used but was put in his mouth by critics and Republicans. His name now means an incompetent, over-his-head, unable-to-connect President.
Obama is still grappling with living up to his campaign 2008 image and unmet expectations of what would happen when he took office: tangible signs of economic recovery with more jobs, a post-partisan, post-racial era and a different foreign policy. But his crisis may be even more profound.
It could have once been argued that we might be seeing a new Presidential type: someone with a different concept of goal-setting not perceived by the media. Could it be that Obama was FM while pundits were on AM? Or maybe it’s simpler: maybe he’s simply a weak AM station.
Some pundits are writing Obama off as a failed President who can only win in 2012 if Republicans gift him an opponent easy to caricature. But IS he another Carter?
Or is it possible that he seems to be morphing into someone else?
To read the rest GO HERE.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.