QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 9:12 A.M. ET:  From British writer and editor Harold Evans, on the style and plight of Barack Obama, one year into his presidency:

Obama enjoys working with the clever advisers he calls his "propeller heads." There is hardly any senior person in the administration who has had to manage a business or meet a payroll, a deficiency that may yet be fatal to the hopes of a recovery, of which more in a moment. His Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, is admirably loyal, but she has been vindicated in her campaign charge that Obama's willingness to meet any adversary, any time anywhere, was naive.

That's one of the best critiques of Obama that I've read.

In his first year, Obama has swallowed humiliation after humiliation from Iran, as Carter did from the ayatollahs all through his ignominious final year. The Iranian leaders have behaved like playground bullies, kicking the pacific Obama in the teeth with as much insulting vigour as they did the demon Bush. The response of the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini to the proffered handshake was: "The Great Satan now has a black face." Even last summer, when millions took to the streets across Iran to protest against the crooked election, and got killed and jailed for their pains, Obama stayed aloof on the grounds that to intervene would be meddling with Iran's elected government (Hello?).

And on the economic picture:

"They used to tell me I was building a dream" is the opening line of the song Yip Harburg wrote in 1932 for Rudy Vallee, meeting a request by President Herbert Hoover to write a melody that would make people forget the Depression. It would be too bad if "Buddy, can you spare a dime?" became the lament for the lost dreams of the Obama presidency.

COMMENT:  That is not a rave review.  I would not buy tickets to the Obama Show.  Tomorrow's vote in Massachusetts, if it works out the way we'd want it to, could be a decisive moment in modern American politics, a verdict on the Obama presidency that, unless the president changes course, can forecast the end.

January 18, 2010