No ODS here. Just weary of incompetence wrapped up as a Christmas present…and being called a racist for pointing it out.

Sick of media types like Dana Milbank telling me how smart Obama is and how lucky we are to have him.

Seeking a template to understand the enigmatic president, I consulted three leading academics in the fields of psychology and behavior. With their help, I put Obama on the couch and came away with a reasonably coherent diagnosis: There’s too much going on in the poor guy’s head.

Among the disadvantages: The complex thinker can suffer from “analysis paralysis” and confusion; he can be perceived as unprincipled or disloyal to the values that elevated him to power; and he can be seen as too willing to make trade-offs.

So indecision making you unfit to lead, it just means that you are just too darned complex? In my business, incompetence like his in a leadership position would get his career options freed up for him.

Milbank sinks deep in the tank, quoting Philip Tetlock, a professor of psychology with the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business:

“Leaders need to be simple enough for people to relate to,” said Tetlock, “but complex enough to explain to people that they can’t have everything.” Obama was simple enough during his campaign, but, as president, became submerged in subtlety.”

Submerged? You bet. Deep as a dung beetle in manure pile. Subtle? So subtle as to approach clueless.

Ace points to this Walter Russel Meade piece titled Falling Between Two Stools. It is an old saying that posits that if you can’t decide which of two stools to sit on, your ass is likely to end up on the ground.

The President looks like a man who is ridden by events; at just the moment when the nation craves a strong leader, the President looks weak, dodgy, uncertain. The contrast with the inflated hopes that an untested and inexperienced Senator Obama did so much to build up is crippling. Obama has fallen so far precisely because he and his supporters so hugely oversold him.

He once despised Bill Clinton for the comprising and triangulating that got him through his eight years. President Obama was going to do it differently: he was going to fight and win.

We are starting to get to know this President a little better, and his chief besetting fault is increasingly clear: the President falls between stools. He is a man of half measures, a man who spends so much money hedging his bets that he loses even when he wins.

Time and again the President angers one side without conciliating the other. His public demand that Israel agree to a complete settlement freeze as a condition for peace talks alienated Israelis (and not just supporters of Prime Minister Netanyahu); his subsequent back peddling humiliated and angered the Palestinians. He pleased no one, fumbled what he had once proclaimed a crucial priority of his administration, and is left with reduced influence with both sides.

At home the President’s hedging has antagonized and energized the right without delivering the goods to his base on the left. The health care bill was so watered down from what candidate Obama proposed on the stump that key constituencies on the left were dismayed; the change was so large that the right was energized; the legislation so compromised and misshapen that it failed to satisfy. The stimulus was the same: large enough to stir up the deficit hawks but too small (and too poorly constructed) to launch a “V” shaped recovery. In the Middle East he has been too cautious and slow in siding with the revolutionaries to dent American unpopularity in the region — but by dropping US support for longtime ally Hosni Mubarak he antagonized and alarmed the Saudis.

This repeated lunge for the sour spot — the place where costs are high and benefits are low — now seems to be a trademark of the President’s decision-making style. On the left it is earning him Carter comparisons from people like Eric Alterman; on the right it means that despite his compromises and yielding of significant ground he continues to feed the incandescent hostility of his bitterest foes. Worst of all, it suggests to people abroad and at home that the way to manipulate this “split the difference”, consensus-seeking President is to raise your demands. If you are going to get something like 50 percent of what you ask for, ask for twice as much as you really want. And with this Presidential style, the squeaking wheel gets the grease. Not surprisingly, all the wheels have begun to squeak.

Here is the paradox we face: The President is a consensus-seeker whose decision making style rewards polarization and a conciliator who loses friends without winning over enemies.

The President’s problem is not, I think, that he seeks compromise. It is that the type of compromise he chooses is so ineffective. Splitting the difference is not leadership; leadership is looking at the positions of two sides and finding creative new directions that give something to all sides — but move the ball down the field.

Now the President and the Democrats generally are stuck in a trap of their own manufacture. State and local governments, starved for funding and losing the federal assistance in the stimulus package are laying off workers and cutting benefits from one end of the country to the other. Unemployment, especially including the long-term unemployed who have dropped out of the labor market, remains painfully high. Key Democratic constituencies feel the administration’s economic policies have failed even as the political logic forces President Obama and his team to start negotiating deficit cuts. He is back to disappointing his friends without winning over his enemies, and that is no good place for a President to be.

Exactly. What he said.