It looks like President Obama is about to consign himself to irrelevance:

In 1982 Ronald Reagan gave his first State of the Union address. His approval rating was about the same as Barack Obama’s now. His economic track record was considerably worse: instead of presiding over the end of a recession, he had presided over the beginning of one, and the economy was in free fall. Nonetheless, Reagan mounted an unapologetic defense of his economic ideology, combined with a harsh critique of his precedecessors.

We haven’t heard Obama’s SOTU yet. But the big news seems to be the spending freeze. What I hear from bat-squeaks is that it’s not a big deal on economic substance, and that admin officials hope it will clear the way for some modest job-creation efforts. We’ll see about that. Rhetorically, however, Obama is clearly, conspicuously endorsing his opponents’ world-view — which will buy him precisely nothing in return.

I can't really find words to capture the level of EPIC FAIL that we are approaching here. It's truly baffling. While Obama seems on balance to be a nice guy, and I don't doubt his basic smarts, he or the people he's listening to are showing themselves to be utterly politically incompetent. Meanwhile the actual dude who got him elected has been reduced to writing op eds, which the White House is ignoring.

As per Atrios, it really does seem as if the people in charge have no idea what they are doing. I think I'll probably stop writing about this until there's some change in the general downward spiral action.