The problem is that Obama believed the Madison Avenue nonsense that was propagated about him. He is not very smart (just shrewd at times), not very convincing (on the world stage and in the halls of congress), and is addicted to The Chicago Way of doing political business. He also has surrounded himself with ideologues – Axelrod, Jarrett, Gibbs, Emanuel who are even more out of touch with the American people than he is. He has never had, in his brief political life, to work with the opposition and his response last April to Republican concerns about the massive stimulus plan “I won”, speaks of an arrogance that is not very promising for our future. His pig-headed, heavy-handed insistence on pressing forward with the unpopular and unwanted government take-over of our health care shows him to be far more the ideologue that he claims not to be. Allowing Nancy Pelosi who is one of the more ignorant members of congress and a hard core San Francisco leftist to be unofficial domestic policy Czar was the height of folly. Hillary Clinton made a huge mistake in joining this administration and I suspect she knows that.  Obama must have thought that the world would be calm due to his wise messianic presence and he could afford to keep his enemy close.

by Michael Barone

How could such smart people do so many stupid things? (Ed. note: they are not smart!) That question, or variations on it, is being asked in Washington and around the country about the Obama administration.

The same people who directed the campaign that defeated Hillary Clinton and routed John McCain, a campaign that raised far more money and attracted far more volunteers than any before it, have within a year come up with a legislative program that is crashing in ruins and that, to judge from recent polls, has left the Democratic party weaker than I have seen it in almost 50 years of closely following politics.

The 2008 campaign was an impressive achievement. So, in a negative way, is the 2009 legislative program that has left the Democrats in such woeful shape in 2010.

Some in Washington say that the problem is that Barack Obama has chosen to rely on his campaign staff rather than the wise old heads in Washington. But Obama and his team have had the benefit of advice from those wise old heads and from the smartest political strategist the Democratic party has produced in the past half-century, Bill Clinton.

[…]

Obama campaigned as someone who would rise above partisan divisions. He first attracted national attention in 2004, when our politics was a kind of culture war, by stressing what red-state America and blue-state America had in common. He campaigned in a similar vein in 2007 and 2008.

But when he came to office in 2009, the cultural issues that had occupied so much of the political landscape for a dozen years had been eclipsed in importance by the financial crisis and the deepening recession.

So Obama was faced with a fundamental choice. He could either chart a bipartisan course in response to the economic emergency, or he could try to expand government to Western European magnitude as Democratic congressional leaders, elected for years in monopartisan districts, had long wished to do.

The former community organizer and Chicago pol chose the latter course.

Read the rest: With absolute power, Team Obama grows stupid