Obama Needs Shorter To-Do List: Noonan

Confidence in Barack Obama is fading fast for many reasons, but above all it’s because he's not tending to "The Sentence,” writes Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal. Clare Boothe Luce once said that all great leaders are summed up by a sentence. “He preserved the union and freed the slaves,” for example. Obama is trying to write a paragraph.

He wants to be the president who gave everyone health care and reduced income inequality and saved the automakers and so on. “But an administration about everything is an administration about nothing,” Noonan argues. History has given Obama a sentence: “He brought America back from economic collapse and kept us strong and secure in the age of terror.” That’s a great sentence, if he earns it. “He should stop looking for a better one.” (More Peggy Noonan stories.)