ACTUALLY...

The Limits of Charisma: Mr. President, please stay off TV. (Howard Fineman, Sep 26, 2009, Newsweek)

If ubiquity were the measure of a presidency, Barack Obama would already be grinning at us from Mount Rushmore. But of course it is not. Despite his many words and television appearances, our elegant and eloquent president remains more an emblem of change than an agent of it. He's a man with an endless, worthy to-do list—health care, climate change, bank reform, global capital regulation, AfPak, the Middle East, you name it—but, as yet, no boxes checked "done." This is a problem that style will not fix. Unless Obama learns to rely less on charm, rhetoric, and good intentions and more on picking his spots and winning in political combat, he's not going to be reelected, let alone enshrined in South Dakota.

The president's problem isn't that he is too visible; it's the lack of content in what he says when he keeps showing up on the tube.

...he'd have less chance of being re-elected if he achieved any of those goals. His best shot is to be an ineffective disaster until the GOP takes Congress in '10 and then work with them to pass W's unfinished business.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 30, 2009 2:01 PM