The Report Card is In

Obama’s celebrated cool has translated for many into its flipside: extravagantly unearned self-assurance. With a persona that oscillates between professor and hipster, he patronizes -- he’s either smarter or cooler than anyone else in the room, and, worse, looks very pleased to be both.

And then there is is tin ear, says Rex Murphy.

Rex Murphy is the old-fashioned kind of reporter who knows what is happening because he asks questions and writes like a word prize-fighter.

So when he says that Obama is "A president in need of a pickup" he isn't talking about a truck.

Scott Brown’s win was the real report card on Barack Obama’s one-year presidency. He may have given himself, in an interview with Dame Oprah of Afternoon Fluff, a B+. Voters of Massachusetts were more clear-eyed and rigorous. They went, let us say, with a “gentleman’s D.”

How did this happen? Obama was a chandelier presence in a world of political moles. Just one year in, his grandest plan (health care reform) is in tatters, his political coat tails have been amputated, his tactical practices and policy initiatives have ignited low-key rebellion in an army of citizens (the Tea Party movement) and his once greatest asset, the soup of honeyed words (Hope, Change) and fortune-cookie mantras (You are the change you’ve been waiting for) that left crowds in a dreamy swoon, have not only staled -- Barack Obama’s speeches are sometimes close to … boring.

Let us begin with the observation that some cars should just stay in the showroom, some horses should stay in the barn. A campaign can flourish on style and image; the presidency insists on substance. The pitch is not the product, the trailer is (sometimes) anything but the movie.

Obama is a parochial politician. He emerged from the small pool of the university environment and Chicago politics -- the former, I think, more significant than the latter. Take his jibes at Scott Brown’s pickup, which he delivered repeatedly in Boston two days before the vote. Only the thickest of tin ears could imagine that slurs and putdowns about driving a pickup have any appeal beyond arugula snobs trading nose-in-the-air witticisms about rednecks.

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