Conservatives aren't the only ones befuddled by the President's Gridiron dinner antics, March madness picks and his strange Saturday radio address focusing on the Paycheck Fairness Act when a government shutdown has been looming for weeks.

Daily Mail's Max Hastings calls Barack Obama "cool, cold, cerebral, and arrogant" in a March 14 lament.

Hastings, like millions of Europeans, fell in lust with the U.S President back in 2008 and now that the bloom is off the stem, he wants to break up. Like most of Obama's star-struck groupies he's racking his brain trying to understand what happened to the knight "mantled in a glittering white cloak...the great speechmaker."

On the Mideast, Afghanistan, the debt, unemployment, and myriad domestic and international crises the One appears "remote" displaying "a curious lack of interest." Curiously, Hastings cites Obama's post-massacre Arizona speech when he "rose to extraordinary heights of rhetoric" as the single exception to the president's otherwise glaring indifference in the face of so much turmoil.

Hastings contention that Obama is "missing in action" makes us wonder whether the President was ever ‘in the action' to begin with. By now, those paying attention know the Chicago trained community organizer did not come to lead but to act as a mouthpiece for those who desire to change the founding fathers' vision of America. And he needs four more years to finish the job. Hastings all but admits this may be the case:

While the world welcomed Obama as a transformational figure, he shows no sign of wishing to fulfil any such grand role.

Indeed, the White House is obsessed with a single issue: how to get its man re-elected in November 2012.

A Washingtonian who has studied the President at close quarters said to me: ‘I think I understand him now. He's a "pol" - a politico - who learned his business in the Chicago machine.