Thanks, Jen, for your good post. I’ll add an additional point to the ones you make. Both of the other presidents you cite — Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan — benefited from being seen as successful presidents who governed when the economy was going strong. If external circumstances had been different, and worse, both men would have paid a much higher political price. The public is willing to overlook a lot if the country seems to be humming along.

Obama’s problem — one of many — is that not only is he breaking a bond of trust with the American public; it’s that he increasingly looks like a president overmatched by events — and his policies are making a difficult economic situation worse rather than better.

Will the bank of dark clouds soon break for Obama? Will he and his party reassert themselves in the next year and in the years to come? It’s possible, of course; Bill Clinton started slowly and recovered. So have others. But it seems to me that Obama’s actions have begun a chain of events that will hurt him, and perhaps haunt him, for some time to come.