As powerful as he is, President Obama seems to be relying awfully heavily on the “helplessness” card, notes James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal.

The World’s Greatest Orator appeared before the press yesterday, and here are some highlights of his remarks: “This is hard stuff. . . . Maybe I should just pack up and go home. Golly. I think it’s a little–as Mark Twain said, rumors of my demise may be a little exaggerated at this point. . . . Right now things are pretty dysfunctional up on Capitol Hill. . . . You seem to suggest that somehow these folks over there [in Congress] have no responsibilities and that my job is to somehow get them to behave. That’s their job. . . . I cannot force Republicans to embrace those common-sense solutions. . . . We’re going to try to do everything we can to create a permission structure for them to be able to do what’s going to be best for the country.”

If only they could bottle this stuff and sell it, they’d have a sleeping pill that lasts eight years. President Obama’s performance reminded National Journal’s Ron Fournier of a long-ago news conference in which President Clinton projected “a sense of helplessness–or even haplessness–against forces seemingly out of a president’s control.” That was on April 18, 1995, shortly after the Republicans took Congress and before Clinton figured out how to get the better of them.

“It was, by most accounts, the lowest point of the Clinton presidency,” Fournier writes. “The next day, domestic terrorists bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and Clinton’s strong response put him back on track for reelection in 1996.” We hope no one accuses us of being an Obama-hating wingnut, but we really hope something like that doesn’t happen again.