Can we stop saying that Barack Obama is an especially popular President? Because it’s just not true. Oh, to be sure, the President will receive a boost in the polls thanks to his non-State of the Union address, but said bump will likely be temporary and it does not disguise the fact that the President is not nearly as popular as commentators make him out to be. He does fine in the court of public opinion, but all things considered, the numbers ain’t that stratospheric.

This all goes back to the fact that Barack Obama is not the messiah. He is just another politician. Terrified Republicans would do well to take note.

Promises of transparency notwithstanding, the Obama Administration has adopted the mysterious habit of not allowing various Presidential directives to appear on the White House web site where they can be seen by the public. These directives are available via the Federal Register, but only major government geeks know what the Federal Register even is, so it is not as if the cause of transparency is furthered. Even if one is a major government geek, one will likely rely on the White House web site to find this material. Key passage:

There was no apparent rhyme or reason to the omissions. A proclamation Obama issued on February 2 for African-American History Month was e-mailed to the press and posted on the White House web site. But another presidential proclamation the same day for American Heart Month slipped by.

Such notices were routinely released by the White House press office during prior administrations — making their omission all the more unusual given Obama’s oft-repeated pledges of openness.

Most of the documents were posted to the White House web site Tuesday night, after Politico inquired about their absence. “It was a simple oversight,” a spokesman, Ben LaBolt, said.

Was it, really? We know that the Administration has decided to completely and entirely abandon its promise to make legislation available on the Internet for five days before having the President sign it. Given this context, why should anyone believe that these latest omissions stem merely from a “simple oversight”?

Under the Obama Administration, transparency ain’t what it was cracked up to be during the campaign. HopeAndChange has given way to consistent and unmistakable attempts to imitate the grossest parodies of Cheneyesque secrecy. I am glad to see that more people in the media are taking notice of this, but the drumbeat against the opacity of the Administration ought to become a lot more consistent.

“Too bad we don’t have the personnel available to spend the money.”

Revealing:

. . . Paul C. Light, a New York University professor who tracks the transition, said Mr. Obama had announced 56 of nearly 500 officials who need Senate confirmation, nearly twice as many as Presidents Bill Clinton or George W. Bush had by this point. But just 36 have been formally nominated and 26 confirmed, closer to the historical average.

“They were really fast in the first 100 meters,” Mr. Light said, “but this is a 10,000-meter process, and they’ve slowed down quite dramatically. I would have bet you the farm they’d break the recent record, but now they’re on pace to become the slowest.”

Remember: This was supposed to be a disciplined, organized process that would exude competence. It is certainly exuding, but the thing being exuded no longer resembles competence in any way.

Read and be shocked:

Just days before Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner was scheduled to lay out his much-anticipated plan to deal with the toxic assets imperiling the financial system, he and his team made a sudden about-face.

According to several sources involved in the deliberations, Geithner had come to the conclusion that the strategies he and his team had spent weeks working on were too expensive, too complex and too risky for taxpayers.

They needed an alternative and found it in a previously considered initiative to pair private investments and public loans to try to buy the risky assets and take them off the books of banks. There was one problem: They didn’t have enough time to work out many details or consult with others before the plan was supposed to be unveiled.

The sharp course change was one of the key reasons why Geithner’s plan — his first major policy initiative as Treasury secretary — landed with such a thud last Tuesday. Lawmakers, investors and analysts expressed dismay over the lack of specifics. Markets tanked, and fresh doubts arose about the hand now steering the country’s financial policy.

Public acceptance of the plan suffered from several missteps, said sources involved in the decision-making or in close contact with those who were.

The Obama administration, they said, failed to rein in the grand expectations built for the plan on Wall Street and in Washington, concluding that they would rather disappoint the markets with vagueness than lay out a lot of details they might have to change later — a failing they saw in the Bush administration’s handling of the crisis.

Meanwhile, the sources said, Obama’s senior economic advisers were hobbled in crafting the plan by a shortage of personnel. To date, the president has not nominated any assistant secretaries or undersecretaries at the Treasury, and the handful of mid-level staffers who have started work were still finding their offices and getting their building passes and BlackBerrys.

Read More →

Jennifer Rubin makes the case. Key passage:

So we remain baffled about whether he has allowed himself to be run over by events and his own party, or whether this is precisely what he wants — an ultra-liberal, hyper-partisan administration. If the former, we have a serious management issue. If the latter, there are plenty of voters who were deceived.

Link. If true, then it should not be too much to ask for media condemnation. This kind of behavior goes against everything the President promised he would seek to engender in the culture of Washington. George W. Bush got pilloried as a “divider,” a “polarizer,” and “hyperpartisan” for a whole lot less.

In other stimulus-related news, we have this. You know, Caterpillar also wants to have a bilateral free trade deal enacted between the United States and Colombia sometime before the Cubs finally win the World Series. Where is the Administration’s sense of urgency on that issue?

In non-stimulating news, good point. Why is the President trying to put the kibosh on growth-generating economic activities like tourism? On the upside, this mini-kerfuffle gives us yet another opportunity to watch Harry Reid tie himself in knots via the mere act of opening his mouth.

Behold the sunshine patriots. Or, at least, the patriots who only feel patriotic when their side wins an election:

Ye gods. (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

Another of Obama’s goals for the evening was to frame his opponents, which he did frequently. They are “playing politics instead of solving problems,” he said.

He was probably more effective in this gambit, if for no other reason than some of these quotes will be replayed over the next 24 hours. The attacks are still disingenuous, though. Obama suggests that the bulk of his opponents don’t want to do anything at all. This makes them look absurd. It’s true that some people hold this view. But the bulk of his opponents believe in some stimulus bill, just not the one he proposed. This is a perfectly standard political trick, but it’s hard to pull off if you’re a president promising a new kind of politics.

–John Dickerson. See also Jay Cost. The President is very eloquent. But his political accusations are very ugly. It takes a lot of skill to lend eloquence to ugliness but at the end of the day, the President’s rhetoric has about as much intellectual integrity to it as does his stimulus package.