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Brooks says President Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, was about incremental improvement, about continuity and defensive in nature, and lacked creativity to tackle the many hurdles and lacked most of all the audacity needed to set the country on the right track.

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Friedman says Obama's 2012 presidential campaign lacks bold vision, a failure to articulate tangible achievements, and owes too much to campaign consultants. He describes it as being developed in test tube fashion. The failure to embrace and strongly advocate his own presidential commission's Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan, which could be coupled with long term investment in the productive potential of the U.S. economy, shows the lack of courage to prepare a plan going forward. It is likely to cost support of independent, center and center-right voters in the 2012 U.S. presidential election.

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In Bagour, Egypt, in the crowded Nile delta, the old order was represented by Kamal-al-Shazli, a member of Parliament from the ruling party for 46 years. This means he entered Parliament in 1964, eight years after the Suez Crisis of 1956, when Egypt under a young military officer Gamal Abdel Nasser confronted the British and the French over the Suez Canal. Everything here in this town was done through Mr Shazli, the ultimate system of paronage was in place, and everything was named after him. Only the slogans of the anti-colonialism days, the days of hope of improving the living conditions of the people, remain. Everything else has stayed much the same for the vast majority of people. Now the task of changing things requires people to think for themselves and learn to work together to guide their own affairs under a democratic system of government and free expression. And this is quite different from the system in place for over 50 years, just as happened in the old Soviet Union. The old system was held together through a patronage system, bribes, enforced by the ruling party and its state security, and one in which individuals had to trust in the state to do their thinking for them about running the country....

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The Washington Post points out the damage to civil society and the rule of law in Egypt in 2014-2015. It cites the Working Group on Egypt's conclusions that repression only works to increase the extremism in the region. A bipartisan group of seven senators including John McCain and Marc Rubio, in a letter to Mr. Kerry, the U.S. Secretary of State, says the U.S. foreign policy must always support human rights, political reform and civil society. It calls these core principles.

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Bruni on the view that Obama has squandered his advantages of oratorical transcendence, poetry, serious thoughtfulness, in the U.S. presidential election of 2012. He does not mention the lack of a serious plan to turn the economy around, high rate of joblessness and declining incomes that are a basic issue in the 2012 election, and how oratorical transcendence has little correlation with getting the right policies implemented. The Des Moines Register's support in 2008 put Obama on the road to the presidency in 2008 with a victory in the Iowa primary. In 2012 it gave its endorsement to Romney to give him a chance to correct the problems with the economy and to do this with a new effort to forge the bipartisan consensus missing in the Obama first term.

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This WSJ editorial in September 2014 says many of president Obama's statements and decisions on Obama healthcare legislation and implementation, Syria, NSA and privacy, the Middle East, Russia, showed poor judgement. It refers to a piece by Peter Baker in NYT where it is said that Obama mocked how people see him as too professorial, diffident, in a sarcastic statement. The problem says WSJ is that president Obama has poor judgement. Being academically credentialed and quick grasp of subject matter is not the same as having the ability to discern things, instinct and grasp of the essence of the matter. George Bush senior had a long resume and was academically credentialed. By comparison Truman had a short resume and was not academically credentialed or quick with data and analysis. He had something more essential and important- a discerning mind and grasp of the larger picture, as well as listening abilities for exceptional advisors such as General Marshall and Acheson he gathered around him....

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Miller says the whole thing about the super-committee, the polemics between Republicans and President Obama about deficits and billionaires, could end up being a charade with Obama hoping to squeeze by in the 2012 presidential elections and the Republicans equally intent on getting 51%. In the end Obama's poor handling of the debt ceiling, including an unwillingness to go ahead with raising the debt ceiling even if it went to court, says Miller, shows a basic failure of the Obama presidency. In the end he thinks its not that the centre-left is going to be mad at Obama, they will be mad at themselves for believing he was going to be any different.

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Rep. Dave Camp, House Ways and Means Committee chairman, representing northern Michigan, says every deduction in the tax code is there because of a reason, and powerful lobbies will oppose any changes. The best he can do is work himself out of this job as he will have to tackle the Democrats on entitlements, the business lobbies on tax loopholes, and other lobbies protecting their preferences in the tax code. He plans to achieve a simpler tax code with lowered rates of 25% for business and earners above six figures, and 10% for everyone else. The approach he is taking is to be revenue neutral when tackling tax reform, in the belief that the economic growth generated from a simpler tax code and lower rates would generate revenues of 18 to 19% of GDP, up from about 16% today. He says the economc cost of not getting this done to get the economy rolling again is so high that he is upbeat that both sides can come together after the election no matter who wins. He is also looking at a repatriation tax of 5% on profits kept by American companies overseas, which would boost revenues for business which could be reinvested in stead of sitting idle. Today the much steeper tax rate on repatriation makes businesses reluctant to bring it back....

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Drew Western, a professor of psychology at Emory University, asks the question about Obama that is on many people's minds- who is this man who wrote the book "Dreams of My Father." And what happened to him? It is as if he is asking did they conjure up something that didn't exist, was there really too little about the man in a book written when the young Obama was still in law school- about his experience growing up between two races, except a remarkable effort to grapple with that experience. It would say little about the man himself, the choices he would make, the decisions he would face as he entered his thirties, and forties, a period that provides the crucible and the formative experiences in the development of character. It is as if readers had appended their own chapter at the end of the book and conjured up many things that really did not exist. And which would serve as a kind of Rorschach test experience where readers were free to read into the picture whatever they wished to see- and something Obama could use to be all things to all people. Drew Western draws from his knowledge of psychology and his direct or virtual conversations with about 50,000 people to reflect and make some hypotheses about what has happened to Obama, or what Obama was always about. He starts by pointing out what was missing in the inauguration speech and has been missing ever since- a clear sense of narrative and a vision, a story about what had happened and how it could be made different in the midst of the global financial crisis of 2008-2009. Western provides several hypotheses for what has happened. Obama simply lacks the experience to handle the presidency -having been merely a community activist and not run a city, a state or a business, and had accomplished little before becoming president, and had an unremarkable career as a law professor having published nothing during his 12 years at the University of Chicago except an autobiography. And remarkably says Western voted 130 times in the Senate as "present" instead of "yea" or "nay," suggesting a tendency not to take a stand on difficult issues. The auto fuel efficiency standards issue may be the singular exception. The challenges of a presidency are much larger, and the challenges in 2009 were even greater. Obama could not measure upto the task. A related hypothesis is that given the lack of experience and the inability to make the narrative because of an unresolved identity, Obama is willing to do whatever it takes to dial for dollars and get re-elected. ...

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New York Times readers respond to Drew Western's article in Sunday Review, NYT of August 7, 2011. Readers express disappointment with President Obama's lack of courage and initiative.

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Frederick Harris of Columbia University says there is a price to be paid for a black president and it may just be too much for the average black person. There is a difference betwen symbols and substance, betwen a role model and accountability in a representative democracy, which is sadly lacking when the black elites, clergy and politicians fail to debate the issues about the problems facing the black community. Problems related to the increasing poverty among black Americans, and the 14% unemployment for black people. There is he says a strange reticience among the black elite to hold the president accountable on these issues just as they would have done for any Democratic president, even one who was as popular with blacks as Mr. Clinton. He says the experience with Obama is not even remotely comparable to the transformative nature of the work of Rev. Martin Luther King in the black community. It may stem from Obama's multiracial background, growing up in many countries, his elite education and being part of a liberal elite more than of the black community. The price is too high in economic and social terms for the poor or average black person and it has created a divide between the average black person and the black elite, with different concerns and different priorities. Harris points out that poor and poverty are words not mentioned often by Obama. Related to this is the foreclosure crisis in which ordinary black people were hardest hit with no effective help from the president to homeowners badly needing relief. Sheila Bair of the FDIC and Martin Feldstein advocated aggressive help for homeowners under water which did not come from the president. Showing not just the limits of a black presidency, but false hopes, inexperience and lack of leadership in issues that mattered to all Americans in the housing and foreclosure crisis. A populist from Kansas, as Sheila Bair describes herself, had the right instincts and courage of convictions which the president lacked and the entire country needed....

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Einsinger points out that Treasury Geithner's performance reflects the mindset of U.S. president Obama, reflected also in Obama's other appointments in his administration which favored one group over another. Change that Obama talked about in the 2008 election campaign that propelled his candidacy, turned out to be more at the margins than change and action that reflected a vision of the priorities for America's middle class and vast majority of average Americans. By leaving homeowners to a wave of foreclosures, the administration weakened a middle class at the lower end already hit by the lower wages from globalization in manufacturing, other changes in the global economy, high levels of student debt of over $1 trillion, and the lasting damage to unemployment from the global financial crisis.

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Michael Getler describes the missed opportunity under President Obama for using one of America's most talented diplomats to engineer a peace agreement between the warring factions in Afghanistan- the U.S., the Pakistan army, the ISI and its support in the army, the Taliban, and the other parties such as the Haqqani faction and the Afghan government of Karzai. Holbrooke had used his experience for another President, with the same force of his larger than life personality, when he helped bring about the Dayton Accords in a similiar area of stubborn ethnic strife. Could Obama have tapped Holbrooke's skills and set aside the distractions of his personality as coming from an American with unique gifts, talent and achievement, is the question Getler asks. And is this a comment on the nature of the Obama Presidency and America's poorly invested hopes.

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Defense Secretary Gates does not see Russia as the threat it was in the Cold War, first because Russia's conventional forces are a "shadow" of what they were during the Cold War, and Russia has adverse demographic trends that will diminish Russia's ability in conventional forces. He sees the Georgian war in the context of Russia's seeking to exorcize, as he puts it, past humiliations. And Gates sees opportunities in the relationship with Russia. Such things as Russia's willingness to work with the US on Afghanistan. Evidence of this is Russia supporting the renwal of the UN resolution on Afghanistan. Another indication is that Russia he says is very worried about the drugs coming out of Afghanistan, and has been supportive to provide alternative routes for Europeans to get equipment and supplies into Afghanistan. These views come across in an interview on December 17, with Charlie Rose, a five time elected Congressman, for the PBS Charlie Rose show. They are also reflected in an article in Foreign Affairs journal's current issue. Gates was a CIA analyst and has some insightful observations. Gates told Charlie Rose that he does not see the Islamic radicals and violent Islamic extremists as a threat in the same way as the threat in the Cold War years. This threat is not as big as the threat to freedom during the Cold War. He says the failure in strategic communications was huge as agencies of the US government engaged in activities in other countries, like the Agency for International Development and the US Information Agency, were neglected starting in the in the 1990's. Communications in other countries of what the US represented and stands for was left to the Pentagon, a role the Pentagon was ill-suited for. He sees the Islamic terrorism as more of an ideological conflict. Speaking at a town hall meeting at the Balad Air Force base in Iraq, in December, Gates pointed to these communications failures as a real challenge for the new administration. But he now sees a huge opportunity in this past failure, and ways of addressing it creatively, in addition to commiting resources and people to this effort. Walter Pincus wrote this article, and its part of the fineprint analysis effort at the Washington Post in which speeches, reports, and other documents are examined by people like Pincus, to catch the really important things, uncovering the fine print that really makes the headlines. Another aspect of this fineprint effort is that there are a huge number of reports, and speeches and documents that had a tone reminiscent of the Cold War during the Georgia war and yet they do not correctly reflect the real situation about Russia, as Gates sees it from his analysis of what is actually happening. Gates has used Foreign Affairs, the Dec 17 Charlie Rose Show on PBS in which he was interviewed, and the speech at the Balad Air Force base in Iraq, to communicate his views and analysis. They are important to underline and emphasize precisely because they show that all that cold war hysteria reporting and speeches may be misleading and lead to improper conclusions and mistakes in policy, wasted effort, wasted resources, and lost lives. And just as the US strategic communications was starved of resources and effort, so also this necessary work to retrieve and give emphasis to the important things is neglected. One additional link to this is the speech, discussion, and QA session in Washington DC at the time of the G20 summit in which President Medvedev and the new administration's elder statesman and diplomat Marilyn Albright, former secretary of state, expressed their hopes and plans for a new era in Russian-American relations. ...