The End of the Honeymoon for Obama: What’s Next

Barack Obama is going gray, and no wonder. He said a while back that it was hereditary, but weeks like this one must be accelerating the process. Even before Friday’s dramatic shootout and manhunt in Watertown, it had been a remarkably stressful few days for the President.

On Thursday morning, barely twelve hours after standing in the White House Rose Garden and consoling some of the Newtown parents who had come to Washington in a futile effort to put pressure on Congress to introduce tougher gun laws, he departed for Boston, where he told an interfaith service at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, “Every one of us stands with you.” His speech was artful and heartfelt, as were his remarks in the Rose Garden. But in Washington, they don’t give out many marks for artistic impression, and they don’t suspend politics for memorial services. By Thursday evening, when Obama returned to the White House, Politico’s Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, two of the most widely read journalists in the capital, had posted a lengthy article entitled “Behind the Curtain: Obama, boxed in,” which read like an early obituary for his second term:

Obama, regardless of the personality and political approach he displays on any given day, keeps running into the same wall of insurmountable opposition. The cold, hard reality is that the president is trapped in a very frustrating box: He realizes that the vast majority of Congress is as impervious to his pressure as it is his charm. He is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t — and he knows it, several of his friends tell us.

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