Now Chic To Dump on Obama

This rant has become infamous and it may be viewed historically as the moment it was all right for natural supporters to begin to openly question Obama. While Carville's rant is the most compelling example, it's not the only one. Here's Kirsten Powers.

Politics as usual": To most Americans, it's be come a dirty phrase. To the Beltway crowd, it's the reflexive defense for the White House's dispatching of a former president to try muscling Rep. Joe Sestak out of the Pennsylvania Democratic primary.

Obama & Co. wanted to clear the primary field for Sen. Arlen Specter, who embodies everything Americans hate about politicians. A party-switching career pol, "Spineless Specter" holds no discernible principles, save his unshakable belief that he is entitled to hold power.

Sorry, but this isn't "change you can believe in."

Both Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich have given Obama criticism but that's mild compared to this scathing critique by Peggy Noonan, an early supporter.

The original sin in my view is that as soon as the oil rig accident happened the president tried to maintain distance between the gusher and his presidency. He wanted people to associate the disaster with BP and not him. When your most creative thoughts in the middle of a disaster revolve around protecting your position, you are summoning trouble. When you try to dodge ownership of a problem, when you try to hide from responsibility, life will give you ownership and responsibility the hard way. In any case, the strategy was always a little mad. Americans would never think an international petroleum company based in London would worry as much about American shores and wildlife as, say, Americans would. They were never going to blame only BP, or trust it.

I wonder if the president knows what a disaster this is not only for him but for his political assumptions. His philosophy is that it is appropriate for the federal government to occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place in America—confronting its problems of need, injustice, inequality. But in a way, and inevitably, this is always boiled down to a promise: "Trust us here in Washington, we will prove worthy of your trust." Then the oil spill came and government could not do the job, could not meet the need, in fact seemed faraway and incapable: "We pay so much for the government and it can't cap an undersea oil well!"

Even Luis Gutierrez has had criticism for Obama, on immigration.

The top story in the Spanish-language press today is Saturday's march in Phoenix protesting Arizona law SB 1070. Criticism of the Obama administration from Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) and a top Spanish-language newspaper and reports on how Arizona's Latinos are preparing for SB 1070 to go into effect also make the news.

Of course, Chris Mathews, who infamously had a tingle up his leg about Obama, is also now criticizing him.

He has not acted like (the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico) is more important than something else like a fundraiser in California or an interview about basketball with Marv Albert, He doesn't seem to be taking ownership.

Now, some of this is the confluence of events. After all, Obama looks helpless on the Gulf, just as he looks hapless and corrupt on Sestak, just as nothing gets done on immigration. The rest of it is the realization that Obama's rhetoric was really nothing but rhetoric. He's not special. He's just a politician and not an altogether good one at that.