Nile Gardiner is a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst and political commentator. He appears frequently on American and British television and radio, including Fox News Channel, CNN, BBC, Sky News, and NPR.

The lonely president. Barack Obama is increasingly isolated, and scorned by his own supporters

By Nile Gardiner World Last updated: October 12th, 2010

“Isolated, insular, arrogant and clueless.” These are not the words of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, two of America’s fiercest critics of the Obama administration. It is the blunt assessment of the Obama White House by Mark Halperin, editor-at-large and senior political analyst for Time Magazine, for decades a publication at the very heart of the liberal media establishment, and owned by Time Warner, the parent company of CNN.

For anyone who still doubts that Barack Obama is in serious trouble, take a look at Halperin’s searing article, “Why Obama is Losing the Political War”, which is nothing short of a damning indictment of the president’s first 20 months in office. Here’s what Halperin has to say in the latest issue of Time:

Barack Obama is being politically crushed in a vise. From above, by elite opinion about his competence. From below, by mass anger and anxiety over unemployment. And it is too late for him to do anything about this predicament until after November’s elections.

With the exception of core Obama Administration loyalists, most politically engaged elites have reached the same conclusions: the White House is in over its head, isolated, insular, arrogant and clueless about how to get along with or persuade members of Congress, the media, the business community or working-class voters.

As Halperin notes, Obama’s critics come from all corners of the political spectrum:

This view is held by Fox News pundits, executives and anchors at the major old-media outlets, reporters who cover the White House, Democratic and Republican congressional leaders and governors, many Democratic business people and lawyers who raised big money for Obama in 2008, and even some members of the Administration just beyond the inner circle.

As I’ve noted before, there are still those in the liberal elites, not least at The New York Times, who are still in a state of denial regarding the scale of the impending electoral disaster President Obama is facing in November. But a huge chunk of the Left, from The Washington Post to Time Magazine, are now questioning the Obama dream and where it is heading.

Barack Obama cuts an increasingly lonely and forlorn figure in the White House, unloved by his country, and scorned by many of his closest supporters. Not exactly the change he had been hoping for.