VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Obama Fabulists.

During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama was billed as a cool rationalist — a sober and judicious intellectual so unlike the inattentive and twangy “smoke ’em out” George W. Bush, so rational in contrast to the herky-jerky and frenetic John McCain. Like Senator Kerry, our professor president now laments Americans’ descent into emotion. “Facts and science and argument does [sic] not,” our president moans, “seem to be winning the day.”

The largely academic intellectuals whom Obama brought into his administration promised to bring their erudition and logic both to reading public opinion and to providing commensurate winning solutions. Sympathetic liberal pundits also cited their own empirical thinking as proof of a scientific method that they find sorely lacking in the gush and rancor of talk radio, the Tea Party, and Fox News. But in its first 21 months, this administration has serially proved inept at analyzing public opinion, and seems instead governed by predetermined ideology that trumps basic empiricism.

Indeed.