I could spend all day answering that question.
Via Politico:
President Barack Obama says that he is less concerned with scoring “style points” for his improvisational handling of the Syria crisis than in “getting the policy right.” This dismissive defense comes at the precise moment that Washington is awash in brutal critiques of the Obama leadership style.
The president’s harried, serial about-faces on Syria — coupled with the collapse of Larry Summers’s candidacy for chairmanship of the Federal Reserve — have combined to highlight some enduring limitations of Obama’s approach to decision-making, public persuasion and political management.
Across the capital, anxious friends and chortling enemies alike are asking: What’s wrong with Obama?
Any fair answer would acknowledge Washington’s impatient pack-of-wolves phenomenon — the tendency for the media and operative class to froth at the first sign of weakness — and would recognize that Obama has a foundation of genuine assets that have stayed intact during this summer of discontent.
But it’s also true, as acknowledged even by sympathetic lawmakers and some former Obama West Wingers in recent background conversations, that his presidency is in a parlous state, with wounds that are lately self-inflicted. That’s especially troubling because the unforced errors come in a second term when, historically, presidents are expected to be more clear-eyed and confident about the burdens of command. Here is a short list, based on nearly two decades of close observation of the presidency, of what’s wrong with Obama — at the moment, anyway.