Charles Krauthammer writes:
The paradox of this presidency is that this most passive bystander president is at the same time the most ideologically ambitious in decades. ...Obama's discovery that government bureaucracies don't do things very well creates a breathtaking disconnect between his transformative ambitions and his detachment from the job itself. How does his Olympian vision coexist with the lassitude of his actual governance, a passivity that verges on absenteeism?