If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a hundred times: President Obama is destroying the country. Some say this destructiveness is intended; most say it is inadvertent, an outgrowth of inexperience, ideological wrong-headedness and an oddly undefined character. Indeed, on the matter of Mr. Obama’s character, today’s left now sounds like the right of three years ago. They have begun to see through the man and are surprised at how little is there.

Yet there is something more than inexperience or lack of character that defines this presidency: Mr. Obama came of age in a bubble of post-’60s liberalism that conditioned him to be an adversary of American exceptionalism. In this liberalism America’s exceptional status in the world follows from a bargain with the devil—an indulgence in militarism, racism, sexism, corporate greed, and environmental disregard as the means to a broad economic, military, and even cultural supremacy in the world. And therefore America’s greatness is as much the fruit of evil as of a devotion to freedom.

Mr. Obama did not explicitly run on an anti-exceptionalism platform. Yet once he was elected it became clear that his idea of how and where to apply presidential power was shaped precisely by this brand of liberalism. There was his devotion to big government, his passion for redistribution, and his scolding and scapegoating of Wall Street—as if his mandate was somehow to overcome, or at least subdue, American capitalism itself. (more…)

But this is not how our current government behaves. Day after day brings headlines of another legislative, regulatory or enforcement action that gives CEOs and investors reason to hunker down, retain as much cash as possible and ride out whatever storms are ahead. This is not the way to nurture an already fragile recovery, much less help the economy to endure shocks from Europe, natural disasters or a big bank failure.

Consider the headlines only from last week, a slow week by Washington standards, with Congress out of session and President Obama campaigning for three days before going on vacation. Even in the dog days of August, your government was hard at work undermining economic confidence.

• Monday: “Warren Buffett right about taxes, says Obama.” The week began with a one-two tax punch from Warren Buffett and President Obama. The Omaha stock-picker wrote an op-ed begging Congress to raise taxes on millions of Americans who make less than he does, and the President used the first stop of his bus tour, in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, to agree.

“I put a deal before the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, that would have solved this problem,” Mr. Obama said, “and he walked away because his belief was we can’t ask anything of millionaires and billionaires and big corporations in order to close our deficit.” So America’s main job creators are still on notice that a tax increase is in their future in 2013, if not sooner.

• Tuesday: “Federal mortgage role to be preserved: Obama is working to develop new housing policy.” A Washington Post story reported that Mr. Obama has directed a White House team to develop a housing plan that would keep the feds deeply involved in mortgage markets, with subsidies and loan guarantees, perhaps even preserving Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (more…)

• In France, the incidence of violent crimes rose by nearly 15% between 2002 and 2008, according to statistics provided by Eurostat. In Italy violent crime was up 38%. In the EU as a whole, the rate rose by 6% despite declines in robbery and murder.

• As of June 2011, Eurostat reports that the unemployment rate in the euro zone was 9.9%. For the under-25s, it was 20.3%. In Spain, youth unemployment stands at 45.7%, which tops even the Greek rate of 38.5%. Then there’s this remarkable detail: Among Europeans aged 18-34, no fewer than 46%—51 million people in all—live with their parents.

• In 2009, 37.4% of European children were born outside of marriage. That’s more than twice the 1990 rate of 17.4%. The number of children per woman for the EU is 1.56, catastrophically below the replacement rate of 2.1. Roughly half of all Europeans belong in the “dependency” category on account of their youth or old age. Just 64% of the working-age population actually works.

I could go on in this vein for pages, but you get the point. Europe is not a happy place and hasn’t been for nearly a generation. It’s about to get much worse. (more…)

Here, for example, from the Washington Post, is Richard Cohen: “He is the very personification of cognitive dissonance—the gap between what we (especially liberals) expected of the first serious African American presidential candidate and the man he in fact is.” More amazingly yet Mr. Cohen goes on to say of Mr. Obama, who not long ago was almost universally hailed as the greatest orator since Pericles, that he lacks even “the rhetorical qualities of the old-time black politicians.” And to compound the amazement, Mr. Cohen tells us that he cannot even “recall a soaring passage from a speech.”

Overseas it is the same refrain. Everywhere in the world, we read in Germany’s Der Spiegel, not only are the hopes ignited by Mr. Obama being dashed, but his “weakness is a problem for the entire global economy.”

In short, the spell that Mr. Obama once cast—a spell so powerful that instead of ridiculing him when he boasted that he would cause “the oceans to stop rising and the planet to heal,” all of liberaldom fell into a delirious swoon—has now been broken by its traumatic realization that he is neither the “god” Newsweek in all seriousness declared him to be nor even a messianic deliverer.

Hence the question on every lip is—as the title of a much quoted article in the New York Times by Drew Westen of Emory University puts it— “What Happened to Obama?” Attacking from the left, Mr. Westin charges that President Obama has been conciliatory when he should have been aggressively pounding away at all the evildoers on the right. (more…)

Good advice that, not that President Obama followed it during his midday remarks at the White House. Instead, he poured on some lighter fluid, blaming Republicans and Standard & Poor’s for S&P’s credit downgrade while remonstrating that both parties nonetheless had to work together. He also repeated his familiar agenda that more spending now and higher taxes later will fire up the economy and restore America’s financial standing.

The Dow promptly fell another hundred points before tumbling 5.5% on the day. It was ugly out there. The S&P downgrade was a psychological shock, a slap in the face, and markets are naturally in for a rough ride.

But we think it’s also worth stepping back from the daily turmoil to look at the larger picture. To wit, the current U.S. debt debate isn’t a sign of American political “dysfunction,” despite what S&P, the Chinese (see below) and various sages are saying. It’s a sign that we’re finally beginning to comprehend and correct the problem. The process will be messy, as democracy always is, but the brawling is a sign of progress.  (more…)