Overanalyzing Obama

George W. Bush was lucky. Over eight years, the so-called liberal media decided he was an incurable clod, mocked him as the self-described Decider and left his inner life alone.

Not so with Barack Obama, for whom the Oil Spill has unleashed a new rush of psychobabble from the Left, with globs of comment about his detachment, over-rationality and rage deficit.

As everyone from Maureen Dowd to Spike Lee urges the President to "go off," his Press Secretary is reduced to defending the boss against charges of excessive anger management by citing his clenched jaw and order to "Plug the damn hole" as proof of furious displeasure.

Now along comes Frank Rich to advise "Don't Get Mad, Mr. President. Get Even" and assert that "the debate over how to raise the president’s emotional thermostat...allows Obama to duck the more serious doubts about his leadership that have resurfaced along with BP’s oil."

Rich wants the President to stop his intellectual reliance on so-called experts, "credibly seize the narrative that Americans have craved ever since he was elected during the most punishing economic downturn of our lifetime" and transform himself into a new Teddy Roosevelt to "wield the big stick of reform against BP and the other powerful interests that have ripped us off."

For Obama, such sympathetic but insistent prescriptions for more activism, bracketing Tea Party accusations of too much, must be a constant source of wonderment about how the message of hope and change that took him to the White House has collided with realities that lead to picturing him as an impotent Messiah on the one hand and the Devil incarnate on the other.

In this terrible time for Americans, an alternative view would be gratitude for a president with intelligence, ideals and an unflappable temperament who understands the limits of his power and, making human mistakes along the way, is doing fairly well in meeting an unprecedented pileup of challenges.

Would it be too much to ask Obama's critics on the Left for a moratorium on deconstructing him to match the next ten days of silence from Rush Limbaugh on his honeymoon?