On July 15th, 1979, President Jimmy Carter made a televised address to the nation that later became known as “the malaise speech.” America’s economic problems were bad and getting worse. Lines at gas stations, inflation, rising unemployment. The speech that President Carter gave that day was presumably meant to inspire, but ultimately fell on many people’s ears as a litany of what was wrong with Americans and with America. Carter seemed to be blaming Americans for creating their own troubles with their lack of confidence and spirit. It came to define his presidency for many. Of-course, he had already been president for two and a half years when he made this speech. The smiling peanut-farmer from Georgia had become transformed for many into a sour, pinched and pained version of himself. In 1980, Americans chose another smiling former governor as president. Ronald Reagan’s optimism, however, proved considerably more resilient.

President Obama has been president for two and a half weeks. Yet, part of the reason that his honeymoon has been so short (about one day by my count, i.e., Inauguration Day) is that for many, in the media as well as the populace, he effectively became president the day after the election last November. Since then, so many wanted him to be president already, and to shoo George W. Bush out the door, that it feels like he’s already been in office for about three months.

And yet, this President Obama we have just doesn’t seem like the Barack Obama that won the election. The American electorate, it has been said, always goes with the perceived “sunnier” candidate when voting for president, and you can make a very good case for that. There certainly was little contest on that basis between Barack Obama and John McCain. Obama spoke constantly of hope, avoided controversial wedge issues, and projected one of the most unflappably pleasant dispositions of any presidential candidate since the dawn of the TV age. His motto was, famously, “Yes we can.” Yet, the day after the election, Barack Obama turned on a dime. Suddenly, he started telling us, things were not only very bad, but were going to be getting a lot worse. Inevitably. It was easy enough to see the point of this move, tactically speaking. He needed to lower people’s expectations of the coming New Jerusalem that would arrive with his inauguration, just a tad. He needed to set the bar lower with regard to how success would be defined for him in his first few months. And — more controversially, but, I am convinced, truly — he wanted to foster to some extent a sense of crisis, as it would assist him and the Democratic congress in quickly passing sweeping measures to advance their political agenda.

It was understandable the day after the election. But then it continued. And continued. Things were going to get worse, no matter what, President-elect Obama kept saying. There’s a reason you don’t usually hear presidents predict that the economy is going to get worse: it’s because their statements to that effect have a serious self-fulfilling power. If the president says the economy is going to be worse a few months from now, then why should I make a big purchase or any kind of investment? Of-course, American consumers were already cutting back on spending in a big way. But the constant gloomy predictions from the main man in Washington have without a doubt dampened any potential of optimism, and have helped send the economy into a true death-spiral. With consumer spending falling off a cliff, lay-offs are mushrooming, pushing consumer spending even lower, and so on. You don’t have to be an economist to see that it’s a lethal cycle. And President Obama, elected for his sunny optimism, has been unwilling to invest one iota of that winsome hopefulness in any attempt to buck up the spirits of the American consumer.

Even with his inaugural address — a rhetorical opportunity that is understood not to be for specifics, but for inspiration — the overall effect was a downer.

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land — a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.

Americans lack confidence, the president told us. And how much confidence is President Obama giving Americans with his talk in the last couple of days that the economy is headed for “catastrophe” and a recession that might be “irreversible” (a decline that will never ever stop??) if this specific stimulus bill is not passed without further talk. What is so special about this bill? It’s not even President Obama’s own creation.

As Charles Krauthammer observes today:

He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama’s name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.

It’s not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It’s not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.

It’s the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus — and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress’s own budget office says won’t be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

I don’t know if there has ever been a fall-from-grace so immediate and precipitous for an American president. It is not a good thing for him, and it is not a good thing for the country, either.

He wrote in his book, “The Audacity of Hope”:

I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them.

The disappointment being felt by many Americans today is, I think, two-fold. On the one hand, there are those disappointed that President Obama — the agent of hope, optimism and the “Yes we can” spirit — seems to have nothing to purvey but fear itself. And on the other hand, there are those who genuinely projected on him their own hope (albeit incredibly naive) for some kind of post-partisan president.

They are witnessing little but old-style politics in the pursuit of old-style liberal Democratic political goals.

The speed with which all of this has come down is surprising. What’s clear is that the skills that worked for Barack Obama in his election campaign simply don’t work in governing. He is a man with zero experience as an administrator, and no actual track record of forging bi-partisan consensus. Both of those deficits are coming quickly and powerfully to the fore in the current crisis. And if the emperor is not yet being perceived as being without any clothes, these first few weeks appear to have succeeded in stripping him down to his swimming trunks.

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