SIZZLIN' TOFU:

Why I Miss Bill Clinton (Jonah Goldberg, 9/03/10, Real Clear Politics)

[O]bama's "People of Earth, Stop Your Bickering" aloofness often makes him seem exasperated with the country he leads. He doesn't seem to care what the people think. If voters disagree with him, that's their mistake.

He's lost -- if he ever had it -- his appetite for persuasion. Oh, he can explain things just fine. But there's a difference between explaining your position and selling it. Clinton, the consummate salesman, understood the difference.

When you look back, the only thing Obama really sold on the campaign trail was the semi-magical thrill of being one of "the ones we've been waiting for." He didn't sell policy proposals; he sold abstractions.

He even picked fights with abstractions -- insisting, for example, that his biggest opponent in the Democratic primary was "cynicism."

Lots of salesmen start by trying to sell you on a fantasy. That's how they get their hooks in you. Get the customer to say, "yes," in principle before he even knows what he's buying. "Would you like to look young, feel great and eat all you want?" That's the easy part. The hard part is translating that abstract yes into an actual sale.

Obama has never been good at that. There was a lot of talk in the late stages of the Democratic primary about how Obama couldn't "close." People liked the Hope and Change stuff, but he fell short on convincing people he could transmogrify the rhetorical gold into reality. Sure, he won in the end. It was a change election, and he was the ultimate change candidate, with no real record to serve as ballast for all of his hot air.

But then came the governing, when the steak needed to outrank the sizzle.