You see Maureen Dowd’s column on Sunday?  This part, I mean:

The portrait of the first couple in Jodi Kantor’s new book, “The Obamas,” bristles with aggrievement and the rational president’s disdain for the irrational nature of politics, the press and Republicans. Despite what his rivals say, the president and the first lady do believe in American exceptionalism — their own, and they feel overassaulted and underappreciated.

We disappointed them.

As Michelle said to Oprah in an interview she did with the president last May: “I always told the voters, the question isn’t whether Barack Obama is ready to be president. The question is whether we’re ready. And that continues to be the question we have to ask ourselves.”

They still believed, as their friend Valerie Jarrett once said, that Obama was “just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”

If you are a reader of a certain age, you cannot read this passage without thinking of Jimmy Carter, the man who was too good for the people who elected him. As the journalist Elizabeth Drew once said on a PBS documentary about Carter:

 He’s a very, very smart man. And very well intentioned. But feel, feel is very, very important in politics, especially in a president. And Carter just didn’t have very much of it.