Obama falling between the stools

According to this piece from Walter Russell Mead at The American Interest, there are several strikes against President Obama. There is on main one that kept me from voting him in as our first Black President:

Another problem is experience, or rather the lack of it.  While two years in the White House have made him a much more seasoned and experienced figure, there is still a lot about American and international politics that is new to him and to some degree alien to his instincts and values.  Moreover, he came to the White House with next to no experience at running bureaucracies or leading legislative coalitions.  He lacks Lyndon Johnson’s sure sense of what Congress will or won’t do (not to mention Johnson’s legendary ability to build support for his agenda), and he lacks the international seasoning of a George H. W. Bush or Richard Nixon. This kind of experience is what is necessary both at home and abroad to understand the agendas and instincts of various parties and to figure out innovative, forward-looking ideas that can work around entrenched positions and make genuine progress.  Another term or two in the Senate and some time as governor of Illinois might have made Barack Hussein Obama a cannier and more formidable president.  (Bill Clinton had served five extremely educational terms as governor of Arkansas.)

In this piece from Michael Barone (via Instapundit) this quote - "To me that suggests when Mead assesses Obama, at least one question he has in mind is, 'What would Machiavelli do?'" - is certainly in response to this quote:

There seem to be several factors at work that repeatedly push the President into doomed compromises. One is ideology; the President is no socialist or far-left crusader, but he is an urban liberal whose core convictions are on the left end of the center-left. He is smart enough to know that he can’t always or even often get exactly what he wants, but having to govern from a position to the right of his own heart puts him in an awkward position. It is hard to be creative when you are constantly on the back foot.

By instinct, President Obama is not a politician. The President, like many other bright Ivy-educated lawyers, views the world through a legalistic prism, one that underestimates both the power and legitimacy of political considerations in the administration of government. Closing Guantanamo and trying KSM in Lower Manhattan seem both obviously necessary and unambiguously good to the legalistic mind. The ward-heeling politician knows better. This lack of instinctive appreciation for the crooked pathways of the political mindset (a characteristic President Obama shares with Woodrow Wilson) further undercuts the President’s ability to play the political system like a true virtuoso.

OK since if you read the whole thing there are detractors of Obama who compares the President to his predecessor Jimmy Carter, but to another predecessor Woodrow Wilson. President Wilson was a bit too academic to successfully get the Allied Powers on his side in order to prevent another World Ward which sadly happened almost 20 years later. Well at least that was my guess.