BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

I’ve tried to give President Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt. He’s young and inexperienced. He’s never run a government before, but he’s smart, personable and has a nice family.

The problem is he keeps making mistakes that are so sophomoric the doubt just continues to grow like Pinocchio’s nose and the benefit of the doubt looks more and more like a very bad investment.

Take the speech he gave before a Joint Session of Congress on job creation the other night.

His first mistake was giving it.  Speeches before a Joint Session are very special. They are a privilege the Congress affords the President and they come with extremely high expectations. It requires that the President be, well, Presidential. President Obama had little hope of meeting those expectations. He had to issue a clarion call for consensus on a bold new economic agenda replete with innovative new ideas and a roadmap for getting us from here to there.

There was none of that. His speech did not merit a Joint Session. There was a call for consensus, but it was couched in a take-it-or-leave-it, carnival-barker pitch for a patchwork of tax incentives, and more spending on roads, schools, and unemployment insurance. He said seventeen times, according to press reports, that Congress should pass his plan immediately, no if’s and’s or but’s. He didn’t say how he was going to pay for it, although he brought up taxing the rich again.

The President grossly exaggerated the bipartisan agreement he said existed on every plank in his plan. For example, he advocated the ratification of trade agreements that he has had bottled up for years, but he said he would not compromise on the trade adjustment assistance for displaced workers that has caused the trade agreement gridlock for all of those years.

His manner was more arrogant than conciliatory. His message was pure, undiluted, unsaturated snake oil. The language he used to deliver the message was not discernable from campaign rhetoric, and instead of ratcheting down the rhetoric, the next day, he took to the stump in Richmond, VA like the candidate he was in 2008. He said the country spent the summer “fussing” about the deficit. Fussing?

No benefit of the doubt.  Just doubt.

The problem is the same as it was after his last speech to Congress and the one before that and the one before that. What do we do now? Where do we go from here? What does the President do to achieve the consensus he talks about? When do the glittering generalities translate into real governing? It doesn’t matter whether he is pounding the podium in the well of the House of Representatives or in Richmond, Virginia or in Columbus, Ohio. The problem remains the same:  What now?

That is where Obama the Orator fails the test of leadership.

What now?