Drew Weston is right that Obama has failed to tell a story. He has failed to make America understand why we need to do things differently than we were. But Jon Chait is right, too. He has done a lot in his short time in office.
But none of that matters.
Comparing Obama to FDR or Reagan--or any other display of your super historical knowledge pundit kung fu--is irrelevant.
Right or wrong, liberals are turning on the President. More importantly, the liberal punditocracy is abandoning him in droves. It doesn't matter if they're "wrong" to do so. They are. You can see it everywhere. So, while Chait may speak for Very Serious People, those people won't be knocking on doors in 2012.
Weston undermined his case by getting a few facts wrong, but his essential point is correct. I don't think anybody has a clue WTF the president is doing. Some people allege that all of these deals are "exactly what he really wants." (This is the Firebagger line).[*1] Others claim that he is unable to legislate smartly like LBJ, despite the fact that he has actually scored some pretty major legislative victories.
But I don't think there is really much consensus in the broad public on what this President stands for and if something is a win or a loss for him. Was extending the Bush tax cuts a win for him, since he got other stuff done in the Lame Duck? Or was it a loss because he had to chip away at a central campaign promise?
We just don't know what he's going to do next. We do know what the Republicans are going to do next. They are going to extract more tax cuts, deregulation, and budget cuts at every opportunity. The Dems apparently aren't even going to try and extend unemployment benefits, get us the fk out of the Middle East yesterday, or do anything else to fix this. So we're left between a snake oil placebo for economic recovery and no medicine at all. Fuck.
This does not give me confidence. It doesn't give me confidence that Obama can get his base back. Which doesn't give me confidence he can win in 2012. Which does not give me confidence in this country, one that has suffered grievous blows to the rule of law and political accountability in the last 10 or so years.
The only Democrat of any stature that I trust in DC right now is Nancy Pelosi.
[*1] It used to be the right-wing as part of the paranoid style described by Richard Hofstadter that would deliberately ape what they perceived to be left-wing institutions. Now the sekrit muslin Manchurian Candidate meme seems to have its own left wing paranoid version.