David Brooks mentions almost in passing (perhaps it is best this way so as not to bring on another horde of presidential spinners):

Washington is temporarily at the center of the nation’s economic gravity and a noncommercial administration holds sway. This is an administration that has many lawyers and academics but almost no businesspeople in it, let alone self-made entrepreneurs. The president speaks passionately about education and health care reform, but he is strangely aloof from the banking crisis and displays no passion when speaking about commercial drive and success.

This strikes me as an very apt explanation for why the Obama team is so tone deaf and so ineffective in dealing with their main task: economic revival. Their tone veers from hysterical despondency to giddy optimism. They bash industries, threaten executives and then fail to exercise rudimentary oversight with the firms they have supported. Virtually nothing has been proposed to encourage private economic investment and hiring, but the proposals to burden business (e.g. card check, cap-and-trade, capital gains tax hikes, national health care) keep piling up. The president dismisses the stock market as a poll — and then offers stock advice.

All of this is frankly amateurish and unsteady, and belies an ignorance of, if not contempt for, how markets work and investors and businesses plan. And this should be a red flag to voters. These are the people who want to take over more of the economy. They want to set up and regulate a maze of carbon restrictions and taxes. They are going to plan and administer a federalized healthcare system. Their arbitrators are going to fan out around the country to dictate labor agreements for those unlucky employers whose employees get dragooned into signing union authorization cards.

Ah, but you say, “They don’t know anything!” Well that’s true, and they haven’t run anything in the real economy. And they can’t handle what’s already on their plate. And they want to do more and more. Quite sobering, isn’t it?