MoDo: No Go to BHO Mojo

Man, when you lose Maureen Dowd:

On Friday, an ugly job market report led to the stock market’s worst day of the year. As the recovery flat-lined, the president conceded to a crowd at a Honeywell factory in Golden Valley, Minn., that “our economy is still facing some serious headwinds” and getting sucked further into Europe’s sinkhole. In depressing imagery for the start of the summer campaign, cable channels carried the red Dow arrow pointing down while Obama spoke; the Dow wiped out all of its 2012 gains.

The president who started off with such dazzle now seems incapable of stimulating either the economy or the voters. His campaign is offering Obama 2012 car magnets for a donation of $10; cat collars reading “I Meow for Michelle” for $12; an Obama grill spatula for $40, and discounted hoodies and T-shirts. How the mighty have fallen.

Eventually everyone gets the memo, I guess. But she's just getting warmed up:

The legendary speaker who drew campaign crowds in the tens of thousands and inspired a dispirited nation ended up nonchalantly delegating to a pork-happy Congress, disdaining the bully pulpit, neglecting to do any L.B.J.-style grunt work with Congress and the American public, and ceding control of his narrative.

Now, that's only partially true. There were plenty of people who didn't find this guy particularly inspiring, and the problem with controlling the narrative is that, at least at some points, the narrative needs to bear some resemblance to reality. The part about delegation is spot-on, though.

But wait -- there's more:

Cook told Maraniss that she thought Obama’s desire to “play out a superhero life” was “a very strong archetype in his personality.”

Cook would be Genevieve Cook, the apparently non-composite girlfriend that Obama had while he lived in the New York in the 1980s, while Maraniss is David Maraniss, the biographer of Bill Clinton, Vince Lombardi and Roberto Clemente, who has now written a biography of the president, which will come out later this month. We talked a little about that last week. Back to MoDo:

But superheroes and mythic figures must boldly lead. Obama’s caution — ingrained from a life of being deserted by his father and sometimes his mother, and of being, as he wrote to another girlfriend, “caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me” — has restrained him at times.

In some ways, he’s still finding himself, too absorbed to see what’s not working. But the White House is a very hard place to go on a vision quest, especially with a storm brewing.

So why are the long knives coming out now? It's pretty simple, really. It's awfully hard to defend the indefensible and Dowd recognizes that. Barack Obama, like Tom Barrett in Wisconsin and Patrick Quinn in Illinois, has no answers to the myriad financial crises that are coming at us. If you look at Quinn's website, it's a hilarious crazy quilt of logos and links that read like a series of impulses more than a coherent vision.

More importantly, Dowd recognizes that there's a pretty good chance that Obama is going down and she intends to keep her perch. She can always go back to snarking on Republicans, which she prefers to do anyway:

Covering a humorous W. at the unveiling of his portrait, the White House press actually seemed nostalgic for the president who bollixed up Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina and the economy — a sure sign that the Obama magic is flagging.

Yep -- a little W bashing is just what a dispirited press corps needs. It's always more fun to throw turds in the punchbowl than to carry water. And I don't doubt for a minute that Mitt Romney will make a hell of a good piñata.