The Obama Question: A failure of civic leadership?

On Monday, 24 hours before the Democratic Party's, shall we say, misfortunes in New Jersey and Virginia, there appeared in the Times a fateful piece, in which Jeff Zeleny wrote, "Interviews with voters across Iowa offer a window into how the president’s standing has leveled off, especially among the independents and Republicans who contributed ... to his margin of victory in the caucuses here."

On Tuesday, east-coast fellow independents and Republicans officially registered a similar "leveling off" -- exit-polling responses denying this defied a striking conspicuousness -- and by now, it's safe to conclude there's not an outside observer left who doesn't believe there's electoral trouble stirring that's much larger than the interior goings on in two goobernatorial races.

And President Obama had better start getting out in front of it.

I happen to think the electoral trouble is grossly unfair to Obama. He has largely and faithfully stuck to his announced game plan -- securing an economic stimulus package, returning stability to the financial sector, and avoiding Bill Clinton's insurmountable mistake of forcing the details of health-care reform on Congress. For sure, it's been a grind, and many a compromise has been fathered. But those are the leading differences between governing and campaigning.

It's always stunning to witness an electorate that clamors and votes for "change," and then expects its manifestations -- all tidily bundled and handsomely bowed -- within days. There are massive structural, institutional forces in place, Constitutionally speaking, to prevent just that, yet voters proceed in their We-want-it-and-want-it-now obliviousness.

So, yes, it's unfair. But this is politics. Unfairness doesn't count. Perceptions do. And today the arch perception out there -- right or wrong -- is that Obama isn't doing enough.

Or, as the Times' Tom Friedman alternatively framed it, perhaps Obama is indeed doing enough, it's just that the electorate doesn't quite know what he's doing.

Which is to say the president has, Friedman wrote two days before this week's election, a "narrative" problem. "He has not tied all his programs into a single narrative that shows the links between his health care, banking, economic, climate, energy, education and foreign policies," observed the Times' columnist. "His daring but discrete policies are starting to feel like a work plan that we have to slog through, and endlessly compromise over, just to finish for finishing's sake -- not because they are all building blocks of a great national project."

And that criticism, I think, is superbly fair, since such a narrative is Obama's presidential responsibility and it is, further, something he can actually do something about. He cannot snap his fingers and, biblically, create a new world; but he can, campaign-style, tell the country an ambitious story, in which the plot and subplots and characters come together in one intelligible, seamless confluence. A story, as Friedman put it, about "nation-building at home" -- and the sacrifice required.

That's something Obama should run, not walk, toward -- because public doubts about his ultimate ends are shaped by his frustrating and rather technocratic means. And that's the unfortunate narrative that's growing. Wrote, for instance, the Politico's John Harris, in a somewhat Friedmanesque take:

"In the year since he was elected president, Barack Obama has revealed himself as one of the boldest leaders to occupy the Oval Office in the modern era. In that same year, Obama also has revealed himself to be an innately self-protective, constantly calibrating and, in some surprising ways, supremely conventional politician.... This may be a shrewd approach to governing. But it manages almost by definition to defy and disappoint the huge -- and wildly divergent -- expectations Obama encouraged supporters to harbor for his presidency."

Shrewd governance should be, but isn't, enough; not, especially, after expectations were cranked to the hilt. A vast p.r. servicing of public perceptions must accompany that governance -- and in a nation raised on televised entertainment and instant gratification, such servicing also requires at least a touch of bullshit.

Because the lack of it is creating a yawning political vacuum, which Republicans, "moderate" or otherwise, are filling. They may be lousy at governing -- in fact intentionally lousy, since they wouldn't want folks to ever expect a competently helpful government -- but at absolute bullshit they are both peerless and fetching.

And Obama had better start getting out in front of it; not so much with boundless, Republicanlike bamboozlement, but with stirring reminders of why he's there, and just where it is that we are supposed to be heading.