PM Carpenter may be on to something:

Yet that seemed but part of an indescribable drift we’ve watched throughout Obama’s second term. There is, as I’ve opined before, something off, something not quite right in the White House. We have watched immense investments take place this year in, for example, gun control and immigration, even though, especially on the latter, there was never any realistic hope of … anything.

I get the optics, but fundamentally it has felt as though the WH has not itself understood, outside the optics, where it wants to go. It seems lost, waiting (and praying) for little more than the midterms, which could possibly change the Capitol Hill equation–but it’s unwilling to just come and say that, although just coming out and saying that would beat the hell out of all this perceived drift.

Now comes this Syrian debacle, at which even the administration’s allies are either laughing or crying. Obama’s best possible outcome is for Congress to hurriedly vote this turkey of a war authorization down, so he can move on to the higher and far more coherent ground of preventing national ruin and a global financial collapse, courtesy you-know-who.

This is a good question, because Kerry looks like he’s been left out on his own, this whole Syria trail balloon rollout is an awful miscalculation of what the American people are willing to do and how well we remember Iraq War and gun control and immigration reform were all but dead on arrival. Are they really up to this?