Peggy Noonan wonders in the Wall St. Journal:

…
The president’s position is not good. The past few months have been one long loss of ground. His numbers have dipped well below 50%. Top Democrats tell Politico the House is probably lost and the Senate is in jeopardy. “Recovery summer” is coming to look like “mission accomplished.” The president is losing the center.

And on top of that, he is still a mystery to a lot of people.

Actually, what is confounding is that he seems more a mystery to people now than he did when they elected him president.

The president is overexposed, yet on some level the picture is blurry. He’s in your face on TV, but you still don’t fully get him…

Underscoring the unknowns is the continuing question about him and those around him: How did they read the public mood so well before the presidency and so poorly after? In his first 19 months on the job, the president has often focused on issues that were not the top priority of the American people. He was thinking about one thing—health care—when they were thinking about others—the general economy, deficits. He’s on one subject, they’re on another…

He doesn’t fit any categories. He won in 2008 by 9.5 million votes anyway because he was a break with Mr. Bush, and people assumed they’d get to know him. But his more unusual political decisions, and the sometimes contradictory and confusing nature of his leadership, haven’t ameliorated or done away with his unusualness. They’ve heightened it…

…He relies most on his own thinking. He focused on health care, seeing the higher logic. The people focused on something else. But he’s always had faith in his ability to think it through.

Now he’s hit a roadblock, and in November’s elections he will hit another, bigger one. One wonders if he will come to reconsider his heavy reliance on his own thoughts. His predecessor did not brag about his résumé and teased himself about his lack of giant intellect, but he had utmost faith in his gut. By 2006, when he had realized he had reason to doubt even that, he flailed. The presidency has a way of winnowing you down.

The great question is what happens after November. The hope of the White House, which knows it is about to take a drubbing, is probably this: that the Republicans in Congress will devolve into a freak show, overplay their hand, lose their focus, be a little too colorful. If that meme emerges—and the media will be looking for it—the Republicans may wind up giving the president the positive definition he lacks. They could save him…

Plus Tom Ricks on the president’s Iraq/Afstan/economy speech Aug. 31:

It was an ambitious speech that President Obama delivered last night — not just about Iraq, but also Afghanistan and the economy. I thought it amounted to a defense of his presidency. He continues to strike me as a guy who thought he was elected for domestic reasons and so seems to resent how foreign affairs intrude on his time. His rhetoric on the two subjects has the feel of two different men — on foreign policy, kind of tired and clichéd, written by a committee, but on domestic affairs, kind of zingy…

Transcript and video of speech here.

Update: The wondering continues but Ed Morrissey doesn’t wonder a whole lot:

Time wonders how Obama lost his mojo

Some of us might answer that question with “the media was finally forced to cover him properly,” but let’s not get too picky about that now.  At least the media has begun to notice that Hope and Change has worn threadbare in a very short period.  Time calls Barack Obama “Mr. Unpopular” in its headline today, and reports on the steep decline in support for Obama over the course of his nineteen-month administration.  They describe his “overreach” on policy, but Michael Sherer starts off closer to the truth in the beginning of his analysis…

Read on.

Mark
Ottawa