Dur­ing the 2008 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, the Demo­c­ra­tic media’s obse­quiously wor­ship­ful cov­er­age of Barack Obama reached the point of Sat­ur­day Night Live parody.

Then dur­ing the first half of the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion, the Demo­c­ra­tic media could be relied upon to stub­bornly defend all of the President’s poli­cies and over­look the dozens of cam­paign promises he broke. How­ever, the mood of Barack Obama’s media fan boys and girls pal­pa­bly changed by the sum­mer of 2011.

One of Obama’s most faith­ful and enthu­si­as­tic cheer­lead­ers, The New York Times’ Mau­reen Dowd, penned an absolutely scathing op-​​ed enti­tled enti­tled Why Is He Bi? (Sigh) dis­cov­er­ing to her hor­ror that Barack Obama talks out of both sides of his mouth:

Our pres­i­dent likes to be on both sides at once.

In Afghanistan, he wants to go but he wants to stay. He’s surg­ing and with­draw­ing simul­ta­ne­ously. He’s leav­ing fewer troops than are needed for a coun­terin­sur­gency strat­egy and more troops than are needed for a coun­tert­er­ror­ism strat­egy — and he seems to want both strate­gies at the same time. Our work is done but we have to still be there. Our work isn’t done but we can go.

On Libya, Pres­i­dent Obama wants to lead from behind. He’s engag­ing in hos­til­i­ties against Qaddafi while telling Con­gress he’s not engag­ing in hos­til­i­ties against Qaddafi.

On the bud­get, he wants to cut spend­ing and increase spend­ing. On the envi­ron­ment, he wants to increase energy pro­duc­tion but is reluc­tant to drill. On health care, he wants to get every­body cov­ered but will not press for a uni­ver­sal sys­tem. On Wall Street, he assails fat cats, but at cock­tail par­ties, he wants to col­lect some of their fat for his campaign.

On pol­i­tics, he likes to be friends with the other side but bash ’em at the same time. For oth­ers, bipar­ti­san­ship means tran­scend­ing their own prior polit­i­cal iden­ti­ties. For Pres­i­dent Obama, it means that he par­tic­i­pates in all polit­i­cal iden­ti­ties. He does not seem deeply affil­i­ated with any side except his own.

Pres­i­dent Obama’s per­for­mance in his June 29, 2011 press con­fer­ence fur­ther appalled his media sup­port­ers. When asked about his lack of par­tic­i­pa­tion in the nego­ti­a­tions to cut spend­ing and raise the debt ceil­ing, the Pres­i­dent arro­gantly dis­missed the com­plaint: “I am very amused when I start hear­ing com­ments about ‘well the Pres­i­dent needs to show more lead­er­ship on this.’” Then Obama attacked Con­gress for going home to their con­stituents dur­ing the July 4th hol­i­day week­end instead of cut­ting a deal on spend­ing and the debt. What the Pres­i­dent left unsaid is that he has spent most of the past month at fundrais­ers and play­ing golf and is off to yet another vacation.

The next morn­ing, CNN’s Glo­ria Borger asked: Where are the adults in Washington?

Call me old-​​fashioned, but when the pres­i­dent and con­gres­sional lead­ers get into a tus­sle over who should be “lead­ing” the coun­try in mat­ters of real national con­se­quence, I feel like send­ing them to their rooms.

“Call me naïve,” Pres­i­dent Obama said at his news con­fer­ence today. “But my expec­ta­tion is that lead­ers are going to lead.“
Mine, too.

So imag­ine my sur­prise when the pres­i­dent came to his own press con­fer­ence — which he called — with­out any­thing much new to say on pos­si­ble ways get to a deal to raise the national debt ceil­ing. Plenty of talk about games­man­ship, about dead­lines and about how even Sasha and Malia are mature enough to do their school­work before it’s due…

What might actu­ally have counted as news is if the pres­i­dent, as the nation’s leader, had pro­posed a defin­i­tive way out of the bud­get mess — or at least drawn some lines in the sand.

MSNBC’s Mark Halperin was decid­edly less polite in his choice of words to describe what he con­sid­ered the President’s effort to sab­o­tage the debt nego­ti­a­tions and blame the Repub­li­cans, using the four-​​letter slang term for a male penis to describe the President’s behav­ior at the news conference.

My only ques­tion is, what took you so long?