Maureen Dowd's Primal Scream

Here's a bit from a NY Times op-ed piece by Maureen Dowd where she moans that Obama just isn't "alpha male" enough to lead America:

President Obama was on the way to Alpha when a plea came for him to be, well, more alpha.

LuAnn Lavine, a real estate agent from Geneseo, a rural town just up the road from Alpha, Ill., the last stop on the president’s Midwestern bus tour, told The Times’s Jeff Zeleny: “Everyone was so hopeful with him, but Washington grabbed him and here we are. I just want him to stay strong and don’t take the guff. We want a president who is a leader, and I want him to be a little bit stronger.”

Hers was a gentler message than the sign stuck on a post outside Alpha: “One Term President.”

But her three words summed it up: Washington grabbed him. Why did this man whose contempt for Congress is clear, who ran on the idea that he could transform a broken Washington, surrender to its conventional timetable and bureaucratic language?

The “supercommittee” that’s supposed to save us just sounds like more government bloat — supersizing something just as unhealthy as McDonald’s.

Is Obama so isolated he can’t see that Americans are curled up in a ball, beaten down by a financial crisis, an identity crisis, a political crisis and a leadership crisis?

He got the job by blaming Washington. But once you’re in the White House, you are Washington. It’s like the plumber who came to fix the sink waiting for the sink to fix itself.

Obama shows himself to be clueless as a leader. He doesn't get it: a leader has to "lead". The job of the leader isn't to wait for the people to call for action or to wait for Congress to come up with a plan:

At long last, he promised a clear economic plan. Unfortunately, he had the fierce urgency of next month, when Congress gets back to town.

Americans are rattled and want action. They don’t know or care what Congress’s schedule is. They just see the president not doing anything.

...

If Clinton wanted to be president 25 hours a day and W. wanted to be president four hours a day, Obama wants to be president for about 14 hours a day. And that’s fine, as long as you don’t look like you’re phoning it in when the country is dialing 911.

What a disaster.

So the 2012 "choice" for Americans will be between right wing loonies and a do-nothing president. What a choice!