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We’ve got a star driven panel this week as Pat Sajak, and Jonah Goldberg join the show. It’s a fascinating conversation as they talk polling and how they ask the delicate questions, movie marketing, why Obama’s agenda polls terribly, but he himself doesn’t. Also, dogs, liberal economics, Jonah Goldberg’s unintentional impression of a Cylon, the predictable (and gratuitous) Star Trek reference and much more. All this, and Ethel Merman bringing up the rear. Yes, you read that right. Listen in!

For links mentioned in this episode, or to comment, please visit us at Ricochet.com.

We should perhaps discount what was said in May. For, as I have attempted to document in detail here, here, here, here, here, and here, President Obama is a gentleman, and, as such, he is never unintentionally rude. He is, in fact, a master of the insulting gesture, which he seems to reserve for political opponents, such as Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Sarah Palin, and for political leaders in countries, such as England, France, Germany, Israel, and Poland, which were closely associated with the United States prior to the Age of Obama.

This time, however, Barack Obama may be genuinely tired, and he may be depressed as well. He certainly has warrant. In public, he may claim that he deserves a B+ for his first year in office, but the polling data suggests that he has earned a failing mark, and he has to know better.

As I observed in an earlier post, if Barack Obama harbored any doubts as to whether he was leading his party off a cliff, William Daley — the brains behind the Chicago machine — put these doubts to rest in the op-ed that he published on Christmas Eve in The Washington Post, warning that, if the Democrats did not plot “a more centrist course,” they would “risk electoral disaster not just in the upcoming midterms but in many elections to come.”

Barack Obama has thus far led a charmed life — prep school in Hawaii, Occidental College, Columbia University, Harvard Law School, the Illinois State Senate, the U. S. Senate, the Presidency. He did lose a race for a Congressional seat. But, otherwise, to all appearances, he has never even stumbled.

One fact is emblematic. Obama managed to get elected editor of The Harvard Law Review without having to do what all of his predecessors did — which is to write an article of a quality that would allow it to be published in the journal. With the one exception mentioned above, his political races have been easy. Events consistently broke in his favor. He has never really been tested — until now.

And, of course, now he finds himself in over his head.

Obama’s difficulties are of his own making, and they arise from his failure thus far to recognize what it means to be President of the United States.

American presidents put aside personal pique and pay close attention to protocol. They do not bow to queens, kings, and emperors; they do not warmly embrace dictators and thugs; and they do not direct gratuitous insults at America’s allies.

They know that, for a president, the personal is not political and the political is not personal. What happens has little to do with the man and everything to do with the office he holds, and no president can opt out of the responsibilities that go with the office.

A president who ignores the niceties, who stiffs America’s friends and embraces her enemies, who betrays weakness and irresolution with regard to an ongoing war will soon discover that others can be rude as well — that those who sense his weakness will treat him and, more to the point, his country like dirt. This is what the Chinese did when Barack Obama visited Beijing and Copenhagen, and Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have repeatedly done the like.

This is no minor matter — for what begins with calculated rudeness can turn into something far worse, as John Kennedy and Jimmy Carter learned to their regret.

In the domestic sphere, American presidents do not leave the initiative to Congress, and they do not continue the presidential campaign after the election is over — not, that is, if they know what is good for them.

The President of the United States represents the national interest; Congressmen often cater to particular interests. If legislation is left to the latter, principle tends to give way to patronage, and the result can be a profound embarrassment. Like it or not, when he signed the so-called “stimulus” bill, Barack Obama accepted responsibility for the national debt and for the systematic looting embedded in the bill.

Once the looting begins, Congressmen may not be able to help themselves. The current crop needed — Congressmen always need — adult supervision, and Barack Obama offered them none. The same argument applies to the healthcare proposals passed by the House and the Senate, which are, by any system of accounting, a disgrace.

The Obama administration’s handling of terrorism is of a piece with the pattern of irresponsibility evident in its conduct of foreign policy and its management of domestic affairs.

When news came that a Nigerian trained in the Yemen and equipped with an explosive device had very nearly brought down a Northwest Airlines jumbo jet outside Detroit, Janet Napolitano initially thought it appropriate to say that “the system had worked,” and Barack Obama, after remaining ostentatiously silent for three days, dismissed the matter as “allegedly” the work of an “isolated extremist.”

Both backtracked in subsequent statements, to be sure. But it was clear that, at first, neither took the incident seriously.

It was obvious from the start that it was dumb luck and nothing else that saved the passengers on that flight, that no “isolated extremist” could have done what Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab managed to do, and that the elaborate security procedures put in place after 9/11 had failed ignominiously.

By the time that President Obama first bothered to address the matter, it was already evident that the authorities in the United States had been warned about the man and that he had been trained by a branch of Al Q’aeda in the Yemen; and we now know that the religious leader that Abdulmutallab sought out in the Yemen was the very man with whom Major Nidal Malik Hassan was in communication before he massacred thirteen Americans at Fort Hood.

The event at Fort Hood, which revealed deep flaws in our intelligence apparatus, should have been a wake-up call. What Major Hassan did and what Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to do are not crimes in the ordinary sense of the word. They are acts of asymmetric war, intimately linked with one another, and, if we are to reduce the likelihood of things like this happening again, they need to be treated as such.

Even left-liberals are beginning to figure out that something serious is amiss. The latest of these is, of all people, Maureen Dowd — who, on Tuesday, in a column in The New York Times aptly entitled “As the Nation’s Pulse Races, Obama Cannot Seem to Find His,” posed the following question:

If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?

In her column, Dowd went on to compare Obama with Star Trek’s Spock, noting his propensity to oscillate between inspiration and listlessness, and observing just how “chilly” he appeared in “his response to the chilling episode on Flight 253, issuing bulletins through his press secretary and hitting the links.” What bothered her most, however, was that the President of the United States did not even “seem concerned.”

When Obama ran for the Democratic nomination, his opponents — Joe Biden among them — warned that he was not ready. When his party nominated him, Republicans made the same point, but to no avail.

Now, if I am correct in my interpretation of the character of his exhaustion, even Obama appears to realize that he may not be up to the job. It seems not even to have crossed his mind when he ran for the office and assumed it that with the office would come responsibilities of a sort that had never previously encountered and that he had no particular desire to shoulder.

Now he is stuck with those responsibilities, and we are — at least, for the time being — stuck with him. Let’s hope that he returns from Hawaii rested, resolute, and intent on carrying out in a responsible fashion the duties associated with his office — for this would require of him a radical change of course.

Someone should give President Obama sign for his desk in the Oval Office. It should read, “The buck stops here.”

Picard’s introspective and analytical nature bluntly assessed his actions, refusing excuses, with a plan to improve his performance.  Obama may spend time on the White House holodeck, envisioning “what if” scenarios, but an assessment of the year since his election, shows that few of Obama’s campaign promises have come to fruition.

The deficit of $459 billion, which President Obama inherited from George Bush has grown to $1.4 trillion, while the economy has shrunk.  The 3.5-million-jobs-created campaign promise has been watered down to claim 600,000 jobs “saved” .

Racial unity and the audacity of change, promised by the election of our first, Black President, is a farce within a farce, epitomized by rantings from leftist liturgists and  beer-summit photo-ops that mask real, and growing tensions, exacerbated by the man who promised to end them.

Instead of confronting problems and “boldly going where no one has gone before”, Team Obama, trots out a shopping list of dodgy, leftist ambitions which they blindly follow.  Telling Nancy Pelosi and Democrats in congress to “make it so” and create a Stimulus package for him to sign immediately after his inauguration was a bone-headed move.

Obama issued his command, to a congressional crew that wasn’t top notch, and what ensued was a chaotic, 1000 plus pages of legislative pork for projects to study the sexual habits of college freshman, as well as high speed rails from L.A.’s La-La land to Las Vegasland .

Not surprisingly, the Stimulus hasn’t delivered the promised results.  Few critical infrastructure projects were begun as a result of the Stimulus.  Why?  Because President Obama doesn’t understand  how Executive Agencies work.  Obama may  have thought, like Jean-Luc, he could just say “make it so”.  But he was wrong.

Obama didn’t know that regulatory relief  was needed to get critical infrastructure projects moving.  Not $787billion dollars of borrowed money.  Just regulatory relief –for the many wickets and hurdles that every government building project has to go through.  The President could have provided regulatory relief through an Executive Order, costing taxpayers nothing.  So why didn’t the President do it?  Because he’s an inexperienced captain and his crew isn’t very good.

In Star Trek, even Captains of the USS Enterprise make judgment errors, miscalculations.  But, the crew doesn’t sit quietly by and let the Captain plunge them to ruin.  The crew, feels empowered to speak up.  Why?  Because the crew understands that the ship of state is more important  than any ego, more important than any perception of who’s on top.

Cash for Clunkers may go down in history books as one of the most delusional panderings to the populus since Caesars provided bread and circuses to quiet the Roman mob.  Cash for Clunkers cost three times more than advertised— why?  Not just because of complicated calculations concerning cars bought  this month versus the next, but because President Obama doesn’t understand the costs of the bureaucracy that he leads.

Neither Obama nor Democrats in congress understand that federal programs have huge execution risks.  They cost money.  Programs require people, office space, equipment and staffing.  Instead, Obama thought he could just say “make it so”,  and, immediately, checks would be issued and citizens would be appeased.

Small businesses have also been victims, used as Obama’s public relations prop these many months.  He sure says all the right things, but the programs put in place by the Obama Administration are anti-small business and have had a devastating effect on the small business community.   Makes you wish the White House included a Spock-like character as one of the many policy Czars who could always provide the President with the actual facts on issues.

Spock could have told the President that small businesses would  be shut out of stimulus spending.  Why?  Because President Obama doesn’t understand how federal procurement works.  Layering mountains of new requirements on an already over-burdened and shrinking cadre of federal procurement professionals, forces them to move slower, not faster.  Increasing reporting and oversight requirements on this shrinking work force, while allowing  Congress to pressure and intimidate them about speed regarding Stimulus procurements, ensured that federal procurement professionals would be forced to take short cuts, to use existing federal contractors, to bundle lots of small projects together into one contract.

Spock was great at pointing out  the unintended consequence of actions and would have understood that allowing Congress to implement Continuing Resolution after Continuing Resolution, without approving the baseline federal budget meant that no new hiring of procurement personnel was possible, despite the hollow claims of government officials.  Obama ensured, by his very actions, that small businesses would get screwed.  There was no Spock on board to save him.  Or them.

A good first officer would have told the President that Healthcare reform should be off the table, when the GDP is falling, job creation is nil and our debt to the Chinese is growing,.

Instead, we see Obama, continuing to campaign, continuing to promise everything to everybody at the expense of a shrinking group of increasingly exasperated taxpayers.  “Make It So” works, when it’s issued by a leader, who understands the vessel he commands, who has respect for those whose life’s blood he is risking or raiding, who recognizes that there are often unintended consequences that must be considered, carefully, before moving forward, and who always, always, always, limits the risks to his enterprise.

I’ve seen Jean-Luc in action, and I can tell you, Obama is no Jean-Luc.