Heckuva job, Barack

Under the headline, "Heckuva job, Barack," the New York Times' Russ Douthat tells us that President Obama "missed his chance."

He goes on...

Here was an opportunity to cut himself free, in a stroke, from the baggage that’s weighed his presidency down — the implausible expectations, the utopian dreams, the messianic hoo-ha.

Here was a place to draw a clean line between himself and all the overzealous Obamaphiles, at home and abroad, who poured their post-Christian, post-Marxist yearnings into the vessel of his 2008 campaign.

Here was a chance to establish himself, definitively, as an American president — too self-confident to accept an unearned accolade, and too instinctively democratic to go along with European humbug.

He didn't take it. Instead, he took the Nobel Peace Prize.

Douthat called it a "big mistake." He's right

As for the headline, it's an allusion to what George W. Bush said to FEMA director Michael Brown, "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job." Those words haunt the former president to this day.

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