Power Line’s John Hinderaker aptly identifies Barack Obama’s potentially fatal flaw.

Obama… continues to overestimate his verbal skills. All his life, he has been rewarded for assuming a certain pose and offering up platitudes in a reasonably glib fashion. These are minor talents at best, but they got Obama elected President, notwithstanding his lack of original insight into any issue of public policy. Now that he is President, however, these limitations are starting to haunt him. Obama’s foolish and entirely needless assertion that Cambridge policeman James Crowley “acted stupidly” when he arrested Harvard professor Henry Gates is beginning to turn into a political issue that will hurt Obama with broad sectors of the electorate.

This is one more in a series of self-inflicted wounds that have contributed to Obama’s steadily declining standing with Americans.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.