Behind the slide in Obama's poll numbers
(CNN) -- Since President Obama seems to be a reflective soul, he must be reflecting on the irony of his latest predicament: as the man who came into office promising to change everything and who instead seems to have let much of what he promised to fix only get worse. First, the good news: Slowly but surely, the economy is coming back. And that's no small feat, given where it was in 2009. Then, everything else: The constitutional scholar, civil libertarian and antiwar activist can't seem to wake up each day without some basic challenge to his political ecology. The confirmed presence of chemical weapons in Syria now makes some sort of escalation there inevitable, just as the war in Afghanistan winds down. (More military support for the rebels? No-fly zone?)