Peggy Noonan on the President

Peggy Noonan, summarizing Bob Woodward’s evaluation of the President, criticizes the President … a strong political commentary from the right. [And, please don’t read this post and infer my own politics. I like to find incisive commentary and let it create a conversation. Anyone’s comment that questions whether this post belongs on this blog will be deleted.]

Has anyone read Woodward’s book? Is it being ignored? 

Which gets us to Bob Woodward’s “The Price of Politics,” published last month. The portrait it contains of Mr. Obama—of a president who is at once over his head, out of his depth and wholly unaware of the fact—hasn’t received the attention it deserves. Throughout the book, which is a journalistic history of the president’s key economic negotiations with Capitol Hill, Mr. Obama is portrayed as having the appearance and presentation of an academic or intellectual while being strangely clueless in his reading of political situations and dynamics. He is bad at negotiating—in fact doesn’t know how. His confidence is consistently greater than his acumen, his arrogance greater than his grasp.

[In commenting on the Denver debate, in which the President was anything but impressive, she concludes with this…]

People saw for the first time an Obama they may have heard about on radio or in a newspaper but had never seen.

They didn’t see some odd version of the president. They saw the president.

And they didn’t like what they saw, and that would linger.