THE PRESIDENT

Posted at 10:04 a.m. ET

I recall speaking with my mother on the day of the Challenger disaster in 1986.  It was January 28th, and President Reagan was scheduled to make his State of the Union address that evening.  Would the president deliver the speech, or cancel?  My mother said, "He knows what to do."  My mother was a lifelong FDR Democrat.  I don't think she ever voted for a Republican.  But I will always remember the confidence in her voice as she said of Reagan, "He knows what to do."

That is trust.

It is the greatest mantle a president can wear.  The American people must trust their president.  They are willing to forgive all manner of policy differences, as they did with Reagan, as long as they trust him to do the right thing in a crisis, and believe that he has the competence, character, and emotional stability to do it.

That is why I am growing so concerned about President Obama.  Do you get the sense that something is wrong?  Do you sense that it extends beyond policy and goes to the character and essence of the man?  Are you getting the feeling, in these first tests of his presidency, that he is weak and indecisive?  That he wanted to be president simply to be president?  That he cannot - and this is terribly important - stand up under pressure?  Do you sometimes fear that, underneath the cool, there's a tumultuous, angry man? 

The president's first days have not been good.  He seems to lack that style of leadership that came so naturally to Ronald Reagan and to others who filled the office of president, who defined it.  Whatever agenda Obama may have had on inauguration day seems to have been cast aside by his own party's congressional leadership, with virtually no protest from the White House.  Whatever foreign policy plans he dreamed of seem to have been dismissed already by other nations.  He has failed to seize the moment.  Multitudes who expected to be set on fire have felt nothing but a mildly warm glow.  Is this the president, or is it simply Barack Obama, the fine speaker who talked his way past the interview and got the job?

He has not yet faced his first foreign crisis.  Based on what we've seen so far, I dread the moment.

February 9, 2009.