Obama's likely to lose

We all get stuck in the day-to-day and lose sight of the overarching, but the overarching fact of Mr. Obama’s presidency is that he made a bad impression his first years in office and has never turned that impression around. He spent his first 14 months moving on what he was thinking about—health care—and not what the public was thinking about—the economic crash, jobs, spending. He seemed not to be thinking like everyone else, which underscored the idea that he was unresponsive to the crises they were seeing. It’s hard to get past that…

The speech was intellectually incoherent. An administration that spent two years saying, essentially, that high spending is good is suddenly insisting high spending is catastrophic. The president appealed for bipartisan efforts but his manner and approach leave his appeals sounding like diktats. His attempts to seem above the fray leave him seeming distanced and unwilling to risk anything.

Most important, the speech signaled that the White House, after all this time, sees the question of spending as a partisan tool, a weapon to be deployed in an election, and not an actual crisis. This is disrespectful toward citizens who feel honest alarm.