LEXICON CHECK: "FIRST 100 DAYS"

From this essay entitled "Runaway Stimulus" by George F. Will:

...[W]e should remember that it was not FDR's initial burst of activity in 1933 that put the phrase "100 days" into the Western lexicon. It was Napoleon's frenetic trajectory in 1815 that began with his escape from Elba and ended near the Belgian village of Waterloo....

Kathleen Parker, the day before Will's column appeared, wrote a scathing evaluation of Barack Hussein Obama's first weeks as President of the United States in her essay "So Far, Amateur Hour." Excerpt:

...Many suspected that Obama wasn't quite ready, but kept their fingers crossed. Optimistic disappointment is the new holding pattern.

What's missing from Obama's performance...[is] the experience they tried to pretend didn't really matter....

Absent is maturity -- that grown-up quality of leadership that is palpable when the real deal enters a room. There's a reason why elders are respected. They have something the rest of us don't have -- yet -- because we haven't lived long enough. We haven't made the really tough decisions, the ones that are often unpopular.

[...]

Obama wants too much to be liked. This isn't a character flaw. In fact his winning personality and likability have served him well through the years. Growing up in multiple cultures -- black and white, American and Indonesian -- he had to learn how to get along. By all accounts, he became easy company.

But there's a price one pays in becoming president. Giving up being liked is the ultimate public sacrifice....

[...]

In Elkhart, the president seemed locked in campaign mode, still wooing the crowd and seeking approval. At his news conference, the overriding impression was of a man not fully in control of his message or his material....

At this time in America's history, we cannot afford an amateur at our nation's helm. But such an amateur is exactly what the electorate swept into office on November 4.

It remains to be seen exactly how much long-term damage BHO, more concerned with garnering adulation than governing responsibly, can do. It also remains to be seen how much longer BHO can remain "The One," even in the eyes of those who so recently adored and worshiped him.

Have BHO and his followers ever read Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "Ozymandias" and understood the lesson contained therein?

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.