The New York Times this week documented the President’s alienation from his party and lack of personal connections with Congress.  Doing what she does so well, Maureen Dowd piled on today with a sweeping indictment of his term in office:

First the President couldn’t work with Republicans because they were too obdurate. Then he tried to chase down reporters with subpoenas. Now he finds member of his own party an unnecessary distraction.

Thus disillusionment with Barack Obama has  spread like the flu in January. Eventually the press tires of berating Congress and PAC’s and the Supreme Court, and so the narrative must turn to the President. It is disappointing to see those who cheered him into office to whimper their buyer’s remorse, but as Harry Truman famously said, “The buck stops here.”

President Obama’s problem is that he is not Abraham Lincoln and he does not preside in an era of bi-partisanship like Lyndon Johnson. The envisioned “team of rivals” has become the Capitol Circus. And that should not be blamed on the current President.

Abraham Lincoln might have made a team of the radicals on both sides of the aisle, but few others could summon consensus from the raging Congressional zoo.  Lincoln always had a good story to thrust his foes into line and knew when to use his clout, but he was a gift to a fractious nation that might have crumbled without him.  Name another President who would have handled the dismantling of the Union with such grace. Probably not President Obama.

Lyndon Johnson has been recently vaunted for his accomplishments forging the Great Society. He was a politician’s politician, but he presided over Democratic majorities and a Congress with a will toward consensus. Johnson’s personal charm would be despised by Congressional leaders today. His accomplishments of weaving the social safety net are blamed for our mounting deficit, his name breathed with curses from Tea Party leaders. No charm or power would make these beasts leap through hoops.

The dream of healing a divided nation has dissipated, but it is not the President’s fault. True, he has not lived up Lincoln’s “team of rivals” that would struggle over differences and emerge with policy, but that was another time, another gifted leader. Today’s partisanship and media illumination would test the likes of Lincoln.

President Obama has stumbled into a decade of utter vindictiveness, where every act or proposal receives the harsh scrutiny of bitter opponents, where his most amazing accomplishment–universal health care– has been cast as a conspiracy against the middle class, where his withdrawal of American forces from most vulnerable and unwelcome intervention as a sign of weakness, and where his overtures to Congressional leaders have been reflexively spurned as “not enough.”  Not so much a “team of rivals” as a forty-ring circus with each performer posing to the voters, hoping not to get booed out of the ring.

We could wish for a President who could rescue us from this fiasco, but we should not blame one who has struggled in vain to transform it.  We elected these posers; we need to take responsibility for them.

It’s too bad most of the elections this fall are not considered “contested.” They should all be.