Obama Restart Hopes to Avert Self-Inflicted Meltdown

The Los Angeles Times reports that President Barack Obama, humbled by scandalous missteps, hopes to put the political spotlight back on his economic stimulus agenda:

In only his second week in office, Barack Obama is punching the restart button on his presidency.

On Tuesday, Day 14 of a tenure that began with high hopes and soaring promises of bringing a new competence to Washington, Obama essentially admitted that he had lost ground in confronting his biggest challenge - fixing the country's crippled economy - due to the "self-inflicted injury" of naming appointees who had failed to pay their taxes.

He shed two of those appointees and then took to the airwaves - conducting not one but five Oval Office network television interviews in which he sought to seize control over the economic stimulus debate. Republicans have found traction on the issue by painting themselves as defenders of taxpayers and homeowners, while portraying Democrats as frivolous big spenders.

"I'm frustrated with myself, with our team," Obama told NBC's Brian Williams in a comment that was typical for his afternoon of televised mea culpas. "But ultimately my job is to get this thing back on track, because what we need to focus on is a deteriorating economy and getting people back to work."

The frustration's not likely to end anytime soon, given the supercharged expectations the Obama campaign banked on during the election.

In fact, as Victor Davis Hanson argues, this administration's off to one of the worst starts ever, and without a downshifting of Democratic hype, a full-on political meltdown is practically inevitable:

Some of us have been warning that it was not healthy for the U.S. media to have deified rather than questioned Obama, especially given that they tore apart Bush, ridiculed Palin, and caricatured Hillary. And now we can see the results of their two years of advocacy rather than scrutiny.

We are quite literally after two weeks teetering on an Obama implosion—and with no Dick Morris to bail him out—brought on by messianic delusions of grandeur, hubris, and a strange naivete that soaring rhetoric and a multiracial profile can add requisite cover to good old-fashioned Chicago politicking ....

This is quite serious. I can't recall a similarly disastrous start in a half-century (far worse than Bill Clinton's initial slips). Obama immediately must lower the hope-and-change rhetoric, ignore Reid/Pelosi, drop the therapy, and accept the tragic view that the world abroad is not misunderstood but quite dangerous. And he must listen on foreign policy to his National Security Advisor, Billary, and the Secretary of Defense. If he doesn't quit the messianic style and perpetual campaign mode, and begin humbly governing, then he will devolve into Carterism—angry that the once-fawning press betrayed him while we the people, due to our American malaise, are to blame.