All Obama really had going for him in 2008 was a carefully crafted image that appealed to a media than had been already been blurring the lines between mere celebrity and political acumen.   Unfortunately for Obama after three years even the biggest fashion trend becomes stale.  As a result people as shallow as the New York Time's Maureen Dowd and Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi have begun to notice not only that Obama is a one trick pony, hurrying to schedule yet another speech every time he's in a political rut.  They have also noticed the trick has always been pretty lame.   Here's Dowd:

Obama is still suffering from the Speech Illusion, the idea that he can come down from the mountain, read from a Teleprompter, cast a magic spell with his words and climb back up the mountain, while we scurry around and do what he proclaimed.

The days of spinning illusions in a Greek temple in a football stadium are done. The One is dancing on the edge of one term.

Here's Taibbi in a piece titled Obama and Jobs: Why I Don't Believe Him Anymore:

I was hours early for a flight and stuck in a relatively small terminal crammed with people. Only one area in the whole wing had empty seats; an unused gate that contained a TV blaring the CNN broadcast of Obama's Labor Day speech at full volume.

So it was either sit underneath a full-volume broadcast of our fearless president bellowing out his latest hollow promises, or the hellish alternative: retreat to gates full of screaming five year-old children, all of them jacked up on sugar and bawling their eyes out because it was the end of Labor Day weekend and their cruel parents were dragging them home from Disney world.

I ended up choosing the screaming children.

Then there is It's no longer Obama-land in the Hamptons by another deep thinker, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post:

Over the Labor Day weekend, I went to a number of events in the Hamptons. At all of them, Obama was discussed. At none of them - that's none - was he defended. That was remarkable. After all, sitting around various lunch and dinner tables were mostly Democrats. Not only that, some of them had been vociferous Obama supporters, giving time and money to his election effort. They were all disillusioned. 

Let me call the roll. I am talking about are writers and editors, lawyers and shrinks, Wall Street tycoons and freelance photographers, hedge funders and academics, run-of-the-mill Democrats and Democratic activists. They were all politically sophisticated, and just a year ago some of them were still vociferous Obama supporters. No more.

Politically sophisticated?  That must be why members of Cohen's set so often support government policies they would never dream to apply to their own lives, whether it be rolling up massive debt, living as if man made global warming were actually real or sending their children to union dominated schools that are learning free zones.  Someone needs to point out to the self described members of the reality based community that one does not usually become disillusioned unless the brand of thinking previously engaged in has been of the wishful variety.

Every cloud does have its silver lining.  As a group, the credentialed buy not necessarily educated  lawyers, writers, editors, shrinks, hedge fund managers and professors have made complete fools of themselves with their heretofore fulsome praise of a Obama,  a nonentity of a state legislator.   As a result they have probably forfeited their credibility with those outside of their immediate social circle for some time to come.   I think that is the reason this group would reluctantly accept either Huntsman or Romney while despising Perry,  The former two will let them retain that precious delusion they are genuinely more sophisticated than us slobs in flyover country.