HE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE COMPETENT. Peggy Noonan writing in the Wall Street Journal:

The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They're in one reality, he's in another.

Of course. He’s from the “reality-based” community. Read it all.

ADDED. Peggy Noonan has joined the Tea Party: “When you ask a government far away in Washington to handle everything, it will handle nothing well.” Welcome, Peggy.