QUOTE OF THE DAY – FROM VICTOR DAVIS HANSON – AT 9:53 A.M. ET:  Hanson assesses the first year of the Age of Obama, and finds it not good:

The former celebrity Obama has lost that luster, point-by-point over a year, bleeding by a thousand small cuts until he nears 40 percent approval. In themselves, the bad jokes like the flippant remark about the Special Olympics, the lunatic appointments like Anita Dunn and Van Jones, the serial untruths about airing the health-care debate on C-SPAN or shunning lobbyists, the phony deadlines on Gitmo and the Iranians, the bribing of senators with hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayers' funds, the bowing, the snubbing of the British, the use of the race card against tea-party critics, the Skip Gates mess, the Orwellian NEA business, constant fluff photos ops, but rare real press conferences — all that in the aggregate brought Obama to his present state.

Hanson is not on the next state-dinner invitation list.

And he doesn't stop there.

And now the question is not whether the president's charisma can save his unpopular agenda, but rather whether the president's growing unpopularity makes things even worse. This takes place, of course, in a landscape of 10 percent unemployment, a nearly $2 trillion debt, and rising energy prices. Somehow more deficits and subsidized wind and solar won't be winning issues.

No, the Dems have blown all their winning issues.

Finally, how ironic — Obama was elected as a reaction to Bush's mistakes of deficit spending and big-ticket new entitlements that nullified his otherwise effective anti-terrorism war; instead, he took what people liked about Bush and ridiculed them, while trumping Bush's spending that had turned so many off.

COMMENT:  Who would have guessed, in the age of Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy, that the Democratic Party would become so out of touch, so indifferent to the opinions and beliefs of average Americans?  When I was a Democrat, in my very early years, we would have meetings in union halls and community centers.  Now the party meets in Aspen and talks global warming between sessions on the slopes.

January 13, 2010