Just over a year into his tenure, America’s 44th president governs a bitterly divided nation, a world increasingly hard to manage and an America that seems more disillusioned than ever with Washington’s ways. What went wrong?

Pundits, Democratic lawmakers and opinion pollsters offer a smorgasbord of reasons – from Mr Obama’s decision to devote his first year in office to healthcare reform, to the president’s inability to convince voters he can “feel their [economic] pain”, to the apparent ungovernability of today’s Washington. All may indeed have contributed to the quandary in which Mr Obama finds himself. But those around him have a more specific diagnosis – and one that is striking in its uniformity. The Obama White House is geared for campaigning rather than governing, they say.

In dozens of interviews with his closest allies and friends in Washington – most of them given unattributably in order to protect their access to the Oval Office – each observes that the president draws on the advice of a very tight circle. The inner core consists of just four people – Rahm Emanuel, the pugnacious chief of staff; David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, his senior advisers; and Robert Gibbs, his communications chief.

Two, Mr Emanuel and Mr Axelrod, have box-like offices within spitting distance of the Oval Office. The president, who is the first to keep a BlackBerry, rarely holds a meeting, including on national security, without some or all of them present.

With the exception of Mr Emanuel, who was a senior Democrat in the House of Representatives, all were an integral part of Mr Obama’s brilliantly managed campaign. Apart from Mr Gibbs, who is from Alabama, all are Chicagoans – like the president. And barring Richard Nixon’s White House, few can think of an administration that has been so dominated by such a small inner circle.

“It is a very tightly knit group,” says a prominent Obama backer who has visited the White House more than 40 times in the past year. “This is a kind of ‘we few’ group … that achieved the improbable in the most unlikely election victory anyone can remember and, unsurprisingly, their bond is very deep.”

John Podesta, a former chief of staff to Bill Clinton and founder of the Center for American Progress, the most influential think-tank in Mr Obama’s Washington, says that while he believes Mr Obama does hear a range of views, including dissenting advice, problems can arise from the narrow composition of the group itself.

Among the broader circle that Mr Obama also consults are the self-effacing Peter Rouse, who was chief of staff to Tom Daschle in his time as Senate majority leader; Jim Messina, deputy chief of staff; the economics team led by Lawrence Summers and including Peter Orszag, budget director; Joe Biden, the vice-president; and Denis McDonough, deputy national security adviser. But none is part of the inner circle.

“Clearly this kind of core management approach worked for the election campaign and President Obama has extended it to the White House,” says Mr Podesta, who managed Mr Obama’s widely praised post-election transition. “It is a very tight inner circle and that has its advantages. But I would like to see the president make more use of other people in his administration, particularly his cabinet.”

Meanwhile, as “Obama’s ‘Reset’ Button” is “Quickly Changing to ‘Panic’” and he appears to be going into bunker mode as a result, he’s going to need is staff more than ever to keep getting his message out.

Whatever it is this week. Just don’t question it, or the terrorists will have won!

In Virginia, the weather also has changed dramatically. Recently arrived residents in the northern suburbs, accustomed to today’s anemic winters, might find it astonishing to learn that there were once ski runs on Ballantrae Hill in McLean, with a rope tow and local ski club. Snow is so scarce today that most Virginia children probably don’t own a sled. But neighbors came to our home at Hickory Hill nearly every winter weekend to ride saucers and Flexible Flyers.

In those days, I recall my uncle, President Kennedy, standing erect as he rode a toboggan in his top coat, never faltering until he slid into the boxwood at the bottom of the hill. Once, my father, Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, brought a delegation of visiting Eskimos home from the Justice Department for lunch at our house. They spent the afternoon building a great igloo in the deep snow in our backyard. My brothers and sisters played in the structure for several weeks before it began to melt. On weekend afternoons, we commonly joined hundreds of Georgetown residents for ice skating on Washington’s C&O Canal, which these days rarely freezes enough to safely skate.

Meanwhile, Exxon Mobil and its carbon cronies continue to pour money into think tanks whose purpose is to deceive the American public into believing that global warming is a fantasy.

MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan, yesterday:

“Here’s the problem – these ‘snowpocalypses’ that have been going through D.C. and other extreme weather events are precisely what climate scientists have been predicting, fearing and anticipating because of global warming,” Ratigan said.

In fact, Ratigan told viewers during the “Busted” segment of his program, that the heavy snowfall totals were evidence of global warming.

“Why is that? The thinking that warmer air temperatures on the earth, a higher air temperature, has a greater capacity to hold moisture at any temperature,” Ratigan said. “And then as winter comes in, that warm air cools full of water, and you get heavier precipitation on a more regular basis. In fact, you could argue these storms are not evidence of a lack of global warming, but are evidence of global warming – thus the 26 inches of snowfall in the DC area and the second giant storm this year.” [Emphasis added]

So let’s recap: not enough snow? Evidence of global warming. Snowpocalypse Now? Evidence of global warming. And remember, we only have have five years, or 50 feet of snow — whichever comes first — to save the planet from it!

If you follow a movie critic on Twitter, chances are you follow him because you admire his ability to critique the many offerings of Hollywood. Unfortunately, if you follow Roger Ebert, you also get endless tirades on greedy corporate fatcats, ”nutjob Teabaggers,” and how dumb Sarah Palin is.

Ebert is, like many liberals, showing his true colors – and they ain’t pretty. His obsession with Sarah Palin and Tea Partiers provides the perfect example. He spent ample time Tweeting about the recent Tea Party Convention, where Sarah Palin was a featured speaker and – gasp – was paid $100,000 for her appearance (which he must now know that she pledged to donate to other candidates and causes).

Ebert makes a number of references to how much Palin was being paid by both the Tea Party Convention and Fox News - a curious fixation considering he built his long and storied career by discussing the work of screenwriters, directors, actors and actresses – many of whom get paid millions of dollars a pop, as do the ”corporate fatcats” at the studios who back these films.

But here, Ebert goes above and beyond the pale, managing to crassly insult both Palin and the Tea Party attendees by saying:

TeaBagger crowd: polite. The nutjobs who were bussed to Town Halls didn’t get their way paid to Sarah’s $100,000 speech

TeaBagger crowd? Is this what passes for informed commentary? Bashing a group of people with whom you disagree politically by labeling their movement with a degrading pornographic term? Just because the crew at MSNBC thinks it’s a hoot doesn’t mean it’s a great idea. I mean, have you seen MSNBC’s ratings lately?

Did Ebert stop to consider how many of those ”teabaggers” might be Ebert fans who follow him on Twitter? I wonder how many of them read his movie reviews for guidance on their entertainment choices. But like so many of the entertainment world elite, if you disagree with him, you’re a dumbkopf who deserves to be insulted, regardless of whether or not you are a consumer of his product.

Still though, while Ebert is definitely a self-admitted man of the left, he is in the language business. So you can certainly understand him putting down that segment of his potential audience which doesn’t comprehend the nuances and subtleties of the English Language to the same masterful degree that he does:

As the Washington Post notes today:

A year ago, Barack Obama’s true believers were euphoric. [Not the least of where those true believers inside the Post's offices --Ed] The huge and jubilant gathering in Chicago’s Grant Park on election night 2008 gave way to almost 2 million people on the Mall for the president’s inauguration.

He took office as the most popular incoming president in a generation. A movement had become a mandate of nearly 70 million votes. People hoped the new president would bring change to Washington, the hallmark claim of his historic candidacy.

Now, the mood through much of the nation seems restive, even sour. It is almost jarring to look at the photographs from Grant Park, to study those upturned beaming faces, many streaked with tears. Was that a movement? Or just a moment?

Maybe it was all just a hand job:

Update: A closer shot, via Ace of Spades:

Update: Greg Pollowitz posits what’s likely written on Obama’s hand:

Flashback: The New Yorker’s George Packer, written on the day of Obama’s inauguration, January 20, 2009:

There were echoes of Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, but President Obama uttered no words today that will be quoted in a hundred years. He has never been a real stem-winder or a coiner of unforgettable phrases; what he’s always been is a great explainer, who pays the rest of us the highest compliment—the appeal to reason. Today he explained why Americans need to grow up, and the tone and vision of his speech—sober, realistic, clear-minded, undaunted—were absolutely equal to the occasion and the times, down to his requisite scriptural passage: “The time has come to set aside childish things.”

Of course the expiration date on that pledge would come almost immediately afterward via both Rahm and Obama. But still, it was a nice sentiment for the nascent administration, at least during the moment it was being uttered.

(H/T: JG)

It is as always willing to leave its own Big Tent behind at the decisive moment. The continual calls from the Democrat Left for Obama to “grow a spine” are really coded calls to say that the moment is now; that the President must ‘’seize the day, seize the hour.” It’s not as [Jay Cost of Real Clear Politics] imagines, a call to compromise. It’s a call to say that the time for compromise is over. They can drop the mask; they can hoist the Jolly Roger.

What’s the counterforce to that? In the Washington Examiner, Glenn Reynolds writes that “Nashville Shows Tea Party Is America’s Third Great Awakening”:

I attended this past weekend’s National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, and I came away feeling that I had seen something important.  The Tea Party movement is part of something bigger:  America’s Third Great Awakening.

America’s prior Great Awakenings, in the 18th and 19th Centuries, were religious in nature.  Unimpressed with self-serving, ossified, and often corrupt religious institutions, Americans responded with a bottom-up reassertion of faith, and independence.

This time, it’s different.  It’s not America’s churches and seminaries that are in trouble:  It’s America’s politicians and parties.  They’ve grown corrupt, venal, and out-of-touch with the values, and the people, that they’re supposed to represent.  So the people, once again, are reasserting themselves.

Most of the attention focused on this weekend’s convention seemed to involve the keynote speaker, Sarah Palin.  But though Palin wowed the crowd with red-meat attacks on overspending, weak national defense, and broken promises, the key phrase in her speech was this one: “All power is inherent in the people.”

And the biggest action item that she presented the crowd with wasn’t to support Sarah Palin, as most politicians would have asked, but to challenge incumbents in primary races.  Primary battles aren’t “civil war,” she said.  They’re the kind of competition that produces strength in the end.

This seemed to resonate with what I heard from conference attendees. Over and over again, I heard from Tea Party Activists that they were planning to take over their local Republican (and, sometimes Democratic) party apparatus starting at the precinct level and shake things up.

The title of Glenn’s piece calls to mind Tom Wolfe’s epochal 1976 New York magazine article titled, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening.”

The first, and much better remembered half of Wolfe’s title refers to the theme of the 1970s: narcissism intermingled with nihilism. That’s essentially what replaced the New Deal-era liberalism after the latter movement burned itself out in rapid succession with the deaths of JFK, RFK, and MLK, and the disillusionment on the left for the Great Society and South Vietnam and Democratic party elites turned punitive.

The second half of the title of Wolfe’s article referenced the religious revival that was occurring in the American heartland in the 1970s, even as liberal America was becoming increasingly secular. Nearly 40 years later, it seems fairly obvious that the Tea Parties and the growth of America’s religious revivalism are very much intermingled. They stand in sharp contrast to radical environmentalism, what Charles Krauthammer dubbed in 2007 traditional religion’s successor.

Which brings us to the other highly talked about ad during the Super Bowl. While some are questioning the satiric tone of Audi’s “Green Police” ad, Michelle Malkin writes that based on the press releases that Audi issued to accompany the ad, the car manufacturer has learned to stop worrying and love Big Green Brother — for many of the same reasons that big business has historically embraced corporatism in general:

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As the saying endlessly, if erroneously attributed to Chesterton goes, “When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing. He believes in anything.”

And it seems safe to say that the Third Great Awakenings — both of them — can coexist well as a counterbalance to such assaults on reason.

Update: Literally five minutes after writing this post, I found via Google News that Jonah Goldberg comments on, as he calls it, “Audi’s Gorewellian Super Bowl ad” in the L.A. Times. Though Jonah himself is writing on the other side of the country — the suburbs of Washington DC — buried under an avalanche of newly-fallen global warming, with another foot on the way, and trapped in “the GFISZ (that’s Goldberg Family Ice Station Zebra).”

From inside the GFISZ, Jonah writes:

Some eco-bloggers disliked the ad because it reinforces the association of undemocratic statism or PC bullying with environmentalism. Perhaps that’s why the New York Times dubbed it “misguided.”

Meanwhile, some conservatives didn’t like it because it makes light of what they believe is actually happening. After all, in America and Europe, the list of environmental crimes is growing at an almost exponential rate. The ad is absurd, of course, but not nearly as absurd as Audi thinks.

What was Audi’s intent? Presumably, to sell cars.

“The ad only makes sense if it’s aimed at people who acknowledge the moral authority of the green police,” writes Grist magazine’s David Roberts on the Huffington Post. The target audience, according to Roberts, are men who want to “do the right thing.” He’s certainly right that the ad isn’t aimed at people (whom he childishly mocks as “teabaggers”) who worry that their liberties are being slowly eroded.

But the message is hardly “do the right thing.”

To me, the target demographic is a certain subset of spineless upscale white men (all of the perps in the ad are affluent white guys) who just want to go with the flow. In that sense, the Audi ad has a lot in common with those execrable MasterCard commercials. Targeting the same demographic, those ads depicted hapless fathers being harangued by their children to get with the environmental program. MasterCard’s tagline: “Helping Dad become a better man: Priceless.”

The difference is that MasterCard’s ads were earnest, creepy, diabetes-inducing treacle. Audi’s ad not only fails to invest the greens with moral authority, it concedes that the carbon cops are out of control, unjustly bullying people and power-hungry (in a postscript scene, the Green Police pull over real cops for using Styrofoam cups). But, because resistance is futile when it comes to the eco-borg, you might as well get the best car you can.

Yes, paradoxically, despite its out-of-control battalion of eco-cops, the Audi ad is definitely a much softer sell than Mastercard’s otherwise equally Orwellian effort:

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Sarah Palin’s Storm at the Tea Party: Why haven’t responsible Republicans spoken out against her? (Fred Kaplan, Feb. 8, 2010, Slate)

If there is a terrorist attack on the United States in the next few years, we could deal with it more confidently, and respond more effectively, if the president were able to rally a spirit of national unity. George W. Bush was given a chance to do this after Sept. 11 and, despite some initial fumbling, rose well to the occasion, at least for a few months.But if the Republican Party’s most popular aspirant declares that the sitting president doesn’t know we’re at war, isn’t even a commander-in-chief (and crowds roar at this charge with approval), then Obama would have a much harder time repairing a wounded nation.

Clinton: Obama government to drop ‘war on terror’ from lexicon (Reuters, 3/31/09)

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Monday the Obama administration had dropped “war on terror” from its lexicon, rhetoric former President George W. Bush used to justify many of his actions.”The [Obama] administration has stopped using the phrase and I think that speaks for itself. Obviously,” Clinton told reporters…

…if Mr. Obama’s own administration claims we are not in a war and Mr. Kaplan thinks that will make it harder for him to respond after the next time we’re attacked, then why is he attacking Ms Palin instead of the President?

And Kaplan’s piece raises another obvious question: why is Kaplan only now calling for national unity during a time of war, in sharp contradistinction to so many of his articles prior to November of 2008?

Related: Jim Geraghty squares the circle: “Obama’s Latest Gallup Numbers Seem Somewhat Late Bushian.”

And the Dow is headed back in that direction as well, as what Tom Blumer has dubbed the POR economy (for Pelosi-Obama-Reid) trundles on. 

Newsweek and Time were both relatively centrist news magazines that recently attempted reboots as supermarket versions of the leftwing Nation and the center-left New Republic political opinion magazines, respectively. So how’s that working out?

Today, AP reports, “Newsweek Circulation Plunges by 41 percent; Time, 35%.” Similarly, in the world of TV news, where once relatively centrist CNN has increasingly tilted further to the left in recent years, Fox’s late night “Red Eye Celebrates Third Year By Topping CNN Prime Time Last Week,” Mediate notes.

And that’s not the only base that Fox has stolen from CNN, recently.

And speaking of Fox and its discontents, “Arianna Huffington Denounces ‘Extremist’ Beck Yet Employs Sharia Advocate.”

Update: “Vanishing Viewers: CNN, MSNBC Down Over 50% in 25-54 Demo From a Year Ago.”

Related: Lileks on the dino-media: “Every horrid economic contraction brings a die-off, as bad economics combine with shifting tastes to winnow the herd.” Read the whole Bleat.

Related: Hugh Hewitt pens a “Memo to Arianna: Stop being silly.”

• James Lileks, in his latest video for the Star-Tribune: “Let me sum up the [Super Bowl] ads, first: Men are idiots.”
• The Frisky: “5 Super Bowl Commercials About Women Emasculating Men.”
• Ann Althouse:  “Men need pants –That’s the message I got from the Super Bowl.”

(Found via Instapundit; for a January, 2008 look at these themes in television and advertising, click here.)

In a conversation with Mr. Young, Kennedy waxed sentimental about Washington in the early 1960s: “It used to be civilized. The media was on our side. We’d get our work done by one o’clock and by two we were at the White House chasing women. We got the job done, and the reporters focused on the issues. . . . It was civilized.” We now know that Mr. Edwards’s idea of civilization was much the same as Kennedy’s.

(And Mad Men would have you believe that everyone who engaged in these types of extracurricular activities in the early 1960s was a Republican businessman.)

Flash-forward nearly half a century, and it’s obvious that “civilization,” Ted Kennedy-style, rolls on:

• “The Jezebel Guide to Questioning Women’s Femininity.”
• “Palin Exposes Misogyny In The Democratic Base, Again.”
• “SNL Unloads Hate-Filled, F-bomb laden attack on Palin.”
• “Max Blumenthal, Equal-Opportunity Hater.”
• “Andrew Sullivan and Sarah Palin’s Breasts.” (No, really.)
  

And of course, “NOW president pretty upset about shockingly violent Tim Tebow ad.” Though as Allahpundit adds, they’ve been pretty quiet about the Super Bowl ad that featured a mock tackle of octogenarian actress Betty White and didn’t lose too much sleep over a much more vicious and misogynistic football-themed ad in the fall of 2008.

Jack Murtha, one of the most corrupt congressmen in modern history, has died.  The obits will start appearing shortly.

Until the media frames his colorful but checkered past to depict him as one of the lions of the Democrat Party, let’s remember him as he was:

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Oh, look: here’s one now:

A spokesman says Democratic Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a retired Marine Corps officer who became an outspoken critic of the Iraq war, has died. He was 77.

No word yet if the funeral will be held in Okinawa, or perhaps the Center for Instrumented Critical Infrastructure.

Update: As Jim Hoft adds, “The antiwar democrat was famous for his cold-blooded attack on innocent US Marines in Haditha, Iraq.”

Flashback: “Welcome to the Airport for Nobody” — and Real Congressman of Genius:

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