Noonan to Obama: Get Focused

There are two crises facing the new president, writes Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal: the economy and the threat of terrorism. Either one would warrant near-obsessive focus, but President Obama can’t seem to zero in. “What strikes one is the weightlessness of the Obama administration, the jumping from issue to issue and venue to venue from day to day.”

On the economy, “one wonders why, say, the president does not step in and insist on staffing the top level of his Treasury Department,” Noonan writes. On national security, Obama’s distraction is even more worrisome. “Something bad is going to happen—don't we all know this?” The philosopher Isaiah Berlin said leaders are either foxes, who know many things, or hedgehogs, who know one big thing. Oddly, Obama is neither. (More Barack Obama stories.)