It is hard for me to follow the ins and outs of the budget wrangling; to keep from popping an artery I have to maintain a detachment which is difficult when I know that these people are holding a gun to my head to pay off their constituencies. Political footpads, one and all. But at least a legitimate footpad, the mugger with a gun-ready project, on saying, "Your money or your life," doesn't end the robbery with a seemingly high-minded sneer that for you to mind the robbery is to be mean-spirited. A tinge of Maoist self-confession?

One newscaster, of that increasingly rare breed that doesn't make me wish for a soft brick which, when thrown at the television doesn't wreck it but merely switches it off, asked Senator Jim Talent why His O'liness seemed a bit shocked when a half a forest was dumped on his desk for signature. I know it was half a forest because Representative Jerry Lewis, who is everything that his homonym is not, made a big deal of schlepping it around for all to see its leviathan size.

Senator Talent believes that Mr. Obama was blindsided because he never attended to Senate business for he was running for President from the first day in office. He missed, as you recall, an astonishing number of votes.

Now I see Obama as a man of huge ego who wants at least as much as Mr. Clinton to sit in the White House, and did not much think beyond that: he wanted to open the Christmas present but never thought about learning to use it. Ordering and receiving a copy of Photoshop does not make you a graphic artist.

His vacuous statements about Hope and Change, and his infuriatingly smug ditto, "We are the ones we have been waiting for," are utterly calorie free and may be had on any diet. A diet of them entirely would starve the dieter, which is something that we may hope for: seeing these Pod People repeating these instantly shopworn bromides with the look of desperation that one sees in cultists who have sold their all, gone to the mountaintop and were shocked when the Second Coming did not in fact come. And over and over again did not come.

Since Mr. Obama has shirked the business of governance, throwing it over for the more pleasurable (for him) task of campaigning in front of adulatory audiences and lickspittle media, he's at sea. And a marionette for the vultures and redistributionist tax lice in Congress, like Nancy Pelosi, Frank Murtha, Chuck Schumer, and Harry Reid.

There is no question that Obama is highly intelligent, but the problem with high intelligence is that no one is smart enough to foresee everything--even the statist Ira Magaziner, the architect of Mrs. Clinton's failed 1993 stab at socialized medicine, admitted that later on. But Mr. Obama has been intelligent enough to deal with what has been in front of him before--navigating the salons of the bien pensant, being president of a law review, the Ivy League, and being a junior senator shirking senatorial duties, and of course training ACORN in voter fraud and intimidation, and nothing limns his arrogance more than his belief that he could think his way through the shark-infested waters of Congress without having bothered to do his homework. And that homework would have been sitting on committees, attending votes and the assorted heavy lifting which he was too good for. Say what you will about Our Empress, and I have, but she did her homework. All Mr. Obama has done is and strut and preen, uttering vacuities to people pathetically willing to be deceived by his gas, which we are finding is all that he is.

My feelings for Mr. Obama have changed: now I feel some sympathy for him, as well as a good dollop of contempt.