AP discusses whether Obama is a "wuss"

The debate has now shifted to a point that Joe and I had predicted months ago. No longer are we talking policy, but rather, Obama's inability to fight for what he believes in has now turned the debate to a discussion of whether our president is a "wuss." People don't like having discussions about whether their leader is a wuss. The very fact of having the discussion is trouble in and of itself.

Particularly troubling, the administration still thinks the president is playing some game of ten dimensional chess that only he can see:

In an interview this past week, the adviser didn't say, but he did insist the campaign helped Obama hone a style he now uses as president.

"His approach is to keep his eye on the ball and not get bogged down in the tempest of the moment," he said. "He is ultimately a principled pragmatist. He knows where he wants to go, and he's not dogmatic about how to get there."

As president, Obama has dug in against persistent critics or stiff opposition in order to press for a broad, long-term goal.

And for anyone who doesn't have children, or nieces and nephews, or who wasn't a child themselves, that strategy probably makes sense. It's called "waiting until the last minute and then pulling an all-nighter." I had the same discussion with my nephew Anthony in the past year. He explained to me how he always leaves his papers until the last minute, then writes them in one fell swoop where the first edit is the final draft. When I told Anthony that this was the way a kid wrote a paper, not an adult, he protested - no, uncle John, he told me, it's always worked for me in the past, it's my thing.

Waiting until the last minute to get engaged, and then spending all weekend coming up with the details of a one trillion dollar program that you should have been finished with two years ago, is not your "secret style" that you honed through years of experience. It's what kids do. And while it might work for a while, at some point in life you're no longer going to be competing against kids. And when the adults take you on, God help you, and all of us.

PS There's a rather disturbing trend in this article that the AP writer didn't even notice. On a lot of foreign policy, Obama seems to be quite aggressive and well-liked. But on domestic policy, he's increasingly seen as out of touch and a bit of a "wimp." That describes a previous president by the name of George H.W. Bush. He was a one-termer.