A Disillusioned Obama Shill Points Towards A Tough Time For Him In November

Peggy Noonan is one of those people the Left loves to display.

An ex-Reagan speechwriter, she moved to Manhattan and went native in a disgustingly short time, with all the prejudice and vitriol that implies.

With the ascendency of Barack Obama, she became quite the media cheerleader for him in her WSJ columns..and why not? It's what all her friends in Manhattan were doing, and as one of the handful of token 'Republicans' hanging around, she was in demand as verification that this was what all of the Right People were thinking, unlike those bitter clingers in flyover country. And it got her a lot of face time on the alphabet networks as a 'Republican' talking head who could be relied on to pretty much agree with what the other Democrat talking heads were saying.

Now, apparently, the worm has totally turned.

Ms. Noonan's latest opus, entitled ` A Bush League President' is a flat out break with her previous Obama worship:

Presidents command the airwaves, as they used to say. If they want to make something the focus of national discussion, they usually can, at least for a while. And this president is always out there, talking. But—and forgive me, because what I'm about to say is rude—has anyone noticed how boring he is? Plonking platitude after plonking platitude. To see Mr. Obama on the stump is to see a man at the podium who's constantly dribbling away the punch line. He looks pleasant but lacks joy; he's cool but lacks vigor. A lot of what he says could have been said by a president 12 or 20 years ago, little is anchored to the moment. As he makes his points he often seems distracted, as if he's holding a private conversation in his head, noticing crowd size, for instance, and wishing the front row would start fainting again, like they used to. {...}

The old Washington gossip was that the Obama campaign was too confident, now it is that they are nervous. The second seems true if you go by their inability, months after it was clear Mitt Romney would be running against them, to find and fix on a clear line of attack. Months ago he was the out-of-touch corporate raider. Then he was a flip-flopping weasel. They momentarily shifted to right-wing extremist. This week he seems to be a Bushite billionaire.

Will all this work? When you look at Romney you see a wealthy businessman, a Mormon of inherently moderate instinct, a person who is conservative in his personal sphere but who lives and hopes to rise in a world he well knows is not quite so tidy. He doesn't seem extreme.

It's interesting that the Obama campaign isn't using what incumbent presidents always sooner or later use, either straight out or subliminally. And that is "You know me. I've been president for almost four years, you don't know that other guy. In a high-stakes world do you really want someone new?"

You know why they're not using "You know me"? Because we know him, and it's not a plus.

There is a growing air of incompetence around Mr. Obama's White House. It was seen again this week in Supreme Court arguments over the administration's challenge to Arizona's attempted crackdown on illegal immigration. As Greg Stohr of Bloomberg News wrote, the court seemed to be disagreeing with the administration's understanding of federal power: "Solicitor General Donald Verrilli . . . met resistance across ideological lines. . . . Even Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court's only Hispanic and an Obama appointee, told Verrilli his argument is 'not selling very well.' " This follows last month's embarrassing showing over the constitutionality of parts of ObamaCare.

All of this looks so bush league, so scattered. Add it to the General Services Administration, to Solyndra, to the other scandals, and you get a growing sense that no one's in charge, that the administration is paying attention to politics but not day-to-day governance. The two most public cabinet members are Eric Holder at Justice and Janet Napolitano at Homeland Security. He is overseeing the administration's Supreme Court cases. She is in charge of being unmoved by the daily stories of Transportation Security Administration incompetence and even cruelty at our airports. Those incidents and stories continue, but if you go to the Homeland Security website, there is no mention of them. It's as if they don't even exist.

This is the same Peggy Noonan who three and a half years ago was writing paens to Obama's greatness. She called anyone who saw through his act a long time before she did an idiot...especially Governor Sarah Palin.

She'd love you to forget that she was so caught up with being the one of the dinosaur media's favorite Republicans that she was willing to openly endorse an avowed socialist for the presidency, primarily because she and people like Kathleen Parker and David Brooks saw Sarah Palin and people who thought like her as idiots who embarrassed them at the smart, sophisticated parties they attended in Manhattan or Georgetown with their Lefty buddies.

And now, three and a half years late, she's trying desperately to latch back on as an Obama critic!

I wouldn't waste time on this trivial person except for one thing. If the Peggy Noonans of the world are jumping off Obama's ship this early, there's something going on and she smells it in the wind.

It's a sign that even in deepest Manhattan, people are having doubts about President Obama and his re-election chances. If that weren't true, Peggy Noonan wouldn't have written something like this in a desperate attempt to regain a semblance of legitimacy.