In the Financial Times, columnist Martin Wolf, addressing Obama's handling of the unfolding financial crisis, writes:

Has Barack Obama's presidency already failed? In normal times, this would be a ludicrous question. But these are not normal times.

I had to chuckle. Wolf prefaced his comments by ackowleding it normally would be “ludicrous” for a pundit just weeks into a new president's term to declare it a failure. Sheer madness.

What Wolf should have suggested was that it would be ludicrous for a pundit just weeks into a new Republican president's term to declare it a failure. Because that truly is crazy talk. Nobody in the press would ever air such an insulting claim. But when it comes to declaring Democratic presidents to be complete failures just weeks into their tenure, that's old habit by now.

See, members of the press did the same thing back in 1993, the last time a new Democratic president arrived in the White House. As I noted in a November column:

On January 31, 1993, 12 days after Clinton had been sworn into office, Sam Donaldson appeared on ABC and made this jarring announcement: “Last week, we could talk about, 'Is the honeymoon over?' This week, we can talk about, 'Is the presidency over?' ” (At the time, Clinton's approval rating hovered around 65 percent.)

I'm chuckling again reading about Clinton's 65 percent approval rating at the time of the media's failed presidency meme: Isn't that the exact same approval rating Obamaacknowledging enjoys today?