The Weekly Standard’s James W. Ceaser provides a scathing indictment of how Obama has become the unpresidential president
From charisma to populism—this is the slippery slope down which Barack Obama has been sliding over the past two years. In June 2008, Obama the candidate described his nomination as “the moment when .  .  . our planet began to heal.†In June 2010, Obama the president promised his partisans he would find an “ass to kick.â€
Quite frankly, after PeBO’s little video to the Nutroots, I was going to write that he was no longer my president, just simply a man in perpetual campaign mode. I held off. But, the man is no longer my president. He is the president of one small unhinged portion of a country that wants to destroy it.
An ass-thumping president frantically fighting for the little guy—it’s hard to imagine George Washington or Abraham Lincoln choosing to project an image of this kind. Barack Obama has managed a rare feat in American history: The longer he is president, the less presidential he has become. Obama has reversed the usual process of growth and maturation, appearing today far more like a candidate for the presidency—and a very ordinary one at that—than he did during the latter stages of his campaign.
He has also become practitioner-in-chief of what Alexander Hamilton referred to in Federalist 68 as the “little arts of popularity.†These arts, Hamilton well knew, would become an inevitable feature of democratic politics. But their spread from the province of political campaigns into the “normal†conduct of the presidency represents a dramatic reversal of the Founders’ design. The Constitution was crafted to prevent a campaign-style presidency; Obama is in the midst of creating one.
It’s a long article, and well worth the read.
