Where Obama Went Wrong

What’s gone wrong in Obamaland recently? Kimberley Strassel at The Wall Street Journal offers a diagnosis: “The knock on Candidate Obama was that he put style ahead of substance. Who knew what he was going to do (and who cared)? It was all about how he was going to do it—with bipartisanship and ethics and a new era of ‘responsibility.’ Now comes the reckoning. President Obama is being judged not on the what, but the how.” You can take or leave Strassel’s unsurprising conclusion—we must shrink government in order to curb lobbyists influence (we’re dealing with the WSJ op-ed page, here)—but her diagnosis of the Daschle flap is apt: “The administration attempted to explain that what mattered was that it was in the ‘public interest’ to have qualified individuals running government. True. But that's not how Mr. Obama said he'd do things.”