He'll change, I just know he will . . .

I thought - for a second - Maureen Dowd was finally going to take that first step and admit there was a problem . . .

Three years ago, Barack Obama’s unlikely presidential dream was given wings by rapturous Iowans — young, old and in-between — who saw in the fresh-faced, silky-voiced black senator a chance to leap past the bellicose, rancorous Bush years into a modern, competitive future where we once more had luster in the world.

Faced with a country keening for reassurance and reinvention, Obama seems at a loss. Regarding his political skills, he turns out to be the odd case of a pragmatist who can’t learn from his mistakes and adapt.

The president has been so spectacularly unable to fill the leadership void in Washington that the high-spirited Michele Bachmann feels free to purloin Obama’s old mantra.

Obama’s response on Monday to Friday’s Standard & Poor’s downgrade and to the 22 Navy Seal commandos and 8 other soldiers killed by a Taliban rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan was once more too little, too late. It was just like his belated, ineffectual response on the BP oil spill and his reaction to the would-be Christmas Day bomber; it took him three days on vacation in Hawaii to speak about the terrorist incident when the country was scared about national security, and then he spent the next week callously shuttling from the podium to the golf course.

After failing to interrupt his Camp David weekend to buck up the country on one of its worst days in history, he tacked on his condolences for the soldiers’ families to his economic pep talk, in what had to be the most inept oratorical segue of his presidency.

He doesn’t lead, and he doesn’t understand why we don’t feel led.

I thought, yes, yes, Maureen, now just admit that Obama is a lousy president and has always been a lousy president, and we can now move on to the second step where you seek that higher power - a viable candidate for 2012 . . .
But no.

But as Drew Westen, a liberal psychology professor at Emory University wrote in The Times on Sunday, puzzling about what has happened to his former hero’s passion, the president never identifies the villains who cause our epic problems.

Obama’s assumption that you can rise above ascribing villainous motives has caused him to waste huge chunks of his first term seeking bipartisanship from Republicans who were playing him for a dupe. And it has led to Americans regarding the nation’s capital as a place of all villains and no heroes.

My heart sank when I read "first term."  Maureen, Mo-Girl, it is time to face facts . . . you are in an abusive relationship.  No, he is not going to stop drinking or hitting you in that second term.  There are not "villains" causing him to be the worst president since Carter.  You know that when you said he has to go beyond "ascribing villainous motives", you know in your heart of heart that the reason he has not done so is because he can't.

For God's sake, woman, get a grip on reality.