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In the waning weeks of the his first year in office, news outlets have been reporting that President Obama's poll numbers have been sliding, and evidently less than half of the country now approves of the job he is doing.
Some observers attribute this to his to the inevitable decline when campaign euphoria yields to governing drudgery. Another explanation is that the public has overdosed on Obama--his mellifluous voice, his wife's couture, his choice of pets---and is now ready for rehab. Others complain that he can't seem to make decisions; is more focused on public relations than on results; has delivered almost nothing that he promised.
It is interesting that all these are related. More than anything else, every modern President of the United States is a media figure and much less an executive in the traditional sense. Obama is among the best at this line of work. He could easily have been a successful actor or a news reader, and indeed much of what the president does is remarkably similar to the things that actors and news readers do. In the America of today, electoral success at the national level is less a function of executive skill than it is the result of perfect diction and dentition, and the principal reason is that we are governed within a political system devised 200 years ago by people who feared decisive action by a strong executive.
People can certainly make a difference, but anyone who harbors the expectation that the president alone can do anything---particularly to effect change---has not read the Constitution. Almost none of the enumerated powers in the document belong to the chief executive, and everything of real consequence is reserved for the Congress, a generally anarchic assembly of 535 people (not counting their personal and committee staffs), each of whom has his own agenda.
The president is the commander-in-chief, for example, but he operates in that office only to the extent that the Congress appropriates the money for him to do so. This is why, if you didn't like the war in Iraq, your senators and congressmen were just as worthy of opprobrium as George W. Bush. Just about the only power the president can exercise without compromise or oversight is to pardon reprehensible people, which is why every president uses it so extensively.
All this is not for the purpose of giving Barack Obama a bye. His administration has acted with naivete and procrastination in the international arena, and many policies seem to be less decisions to be made than opportunities to have vigorous, disjointed but otherwise pointless and sometimes dysfunctional public debate. George W. Bush's administration was roundly castigated for being intellectually constipated and unerringly on message. Obama's appears to be the polar opposite: a raucous rabble of independent operators.
Perhaps at some illogical, emotional level we long to have a king, but we didn't like it when we did have one. The founders of the United States bequeathed to us, on purpose, an ineffectual structure of government, and it was Teddy Roosevelt who correctly identified the presidency as a bully pulpit. Whatever else one can say about Lyndon Johnson, for example, he got what he wanted because he had spent decades as a legislator and knew exactly what it took to rally public support for any cause---good or bad---and to cajole and intimidate those in the Congress who actually made things happen.
All politicians have large egos, and so it is not surprising that they tend to believe their own press releases, but it is something of a mystery that, after more than two centuries with the same political system, the electorate still expects more from them than they can deliver.
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