OVER THE CLIFT:

Halfhearted Soul-Searching at the White House: Unlike Bill Clinton, Obama hasn’t yet experienced a political loss that taught him how to reinvent himself. He needs to surround himself with advisers who will challenge his world view. (Eleanor Clift, 11/21/10, Newsweek)

Part of Obama’s problem is that there’s too much hero worship around him, and that translates into a reluctance to fault him for anything, except maybe that he didn’t make a good enough case for all the wonderful things he’s done. [...]

Obama is an undefined figure to much of the country, and to his fellow Democrats. Though he’s portrayed as a liberal, it’s not clear what he’ll fight for, and he keeps that deliberately vague, perhaps hoping to deliver on the post-partisan promise his election represented. The fight over whether to extend Bush-era tax cuts is a perfect example. The White House needs to settle on a strategy and then execute it, whatever it is. Hope is not a strategy, and the extent to which Obama seems to weigh the political considerations of whatever decision he makes reinforces the voters’ disillusionment that rather than leading, he has instead become part of the government—an implicit admission of his failure to bring about the change he ran on.