It was a Presidential election year for the record books. An old man, with a distinguished legislative career and a history of personal accomplishment, associated with a two-term, unpopular president, faced off against a young up-and-comer, a dark horse mere months before, who with a winning smile, personal charisma, and an alarmingly short career in public office, promised to banish the ghosts of the ancien regime and usher in a new, post-partisan era of respect for America’s institutions at home and abroad. The young man won, and his Presidency, begun on a hopeful note with a proud Inaugural walk down blustery Washington streets, was immediately subjected to turmoil from his defeated opposition and his own Party.

Admit it: You knew I was talking about 1976.

Those of us born that year either have no memory of the period before Reagan gave us a morning in America, or remember the gray, dark feel of the time, but little else. (Some of us, a scant few, remember believing in miracles, but don’t remember understanding why.) Blessed are we who get to experience not only a chance to see Jimmy Carter II up close, but also to experience the certainty that we wouldn’t be treated to an appreciably more competent administration if his opponent had won.

It’s not too much to say that we just completed a general Presidential election marked by the two least capable potential Presidents in over a quarter century. John McCain’s support was generally marked by low levels of enthusiasm from his base and the general public. His brief surge into nip-and-tuck territory in September died the instant he was required to look and act Presidential: During the TARP talks, when McCain made a bet-the-farm gamble to suspend his campaign, the old war hero managed to look impotent, out-of-his-depth, and confused by the entire process.

The American people correctly discerned that decades in Congress had made the former Naval aviator into a mere horse trader, a man incapable of making hard, executive decisions under pressure; in short, a man not fit for the Presidency.

At the same event, then-candidate Barack Obama coolly sat away from the fracas, joining with then-President Bush as the latter urged Congress to pass the damned thing already. It’s hard to recreate that moment in words, but just take a few minutes and think back: The financial world was in a state of near-collapse, the money markets had gone mad, interbank lending and other measures of liquidity and financial health were so dysfunctional that we literally had investors paying safe asset holders for the privilege of investing there. The whole thing smelled of financial catastrophe, of 1929 all over again, as the herd animals who live and die in the markets were prepared to run off metaphorical and literal cliffs from fear. For all of the grief, rightly and wrongly, that President Bush has taken, he looked and acted like one would expect a President to do, by presenting a simple plan to Congress to stem the tide, then gathering what was left of his political capital to try to force his opposition and his own Party into some version of it.

Next to him, looking cool and in charge, and not coincidentally doing relatively little, was the man who is now our President. It was that moment, I would argue, that led Americans to believe This guy has a solid head on his shoulders, he’s got a feel for executive work, he’s cool under pressure, he’s ready to be President. In other words, by standing next to and looking like the then-President, Obama reassured America he was ready for prime time. (Doubtless, Obama partisans would disagree with this comparison to the much-despised Bush; then again, Obama partisans are not particularly noted for rational thought where Obama is concerned.)

America was wrong.

Personnel is policy, goes the old saw. Until you reach a certain age and level of responsibility at your own job, this makes no sense. Once you understand that in any organization of even moderate size, policy is made, altered, and effected by those you’ve chosen to execute it, you come to understand how vital like-minded personnel with good independent instincts really are.

It’s at this point that most folks who’ve followed the early Obama Administration would expect a Treasury joke (”So that’s why there’s no policy!”). To the contrary, we can all expect the Treasury slots to fill in their own time, though likely not nearly as fast as the circumstances seem to warrant. The problem is a completely different, though related, one: It’s become fairly clear that the Executive Branch is without a Chief Executive, and that vacuum has manifested in the personnel and policy of America abroad. That, in turn, has implications for America at home.

The American foreign policy consensus of the last sixty years — in contrast to the consensus of the hundred seventy before that — is marked by a belief that the projection of American power abroad inures to America’s benefit at home, a belief honed in recent times into the idea that a de facto benign American imperium would, without real imperialism, result in a more peaceful, orderly, and prosperous world, and the data bears this out. President Obama is actively retreating from this consensus. But he is not retreating in an orderly way, consistent with his promise to improve America’s image abroad during the campaign. He is leaving the old, decades-long consensus in bloodied ribbons, with no real substitute except for what appears to be a deliberately amoral interaction with the world.

It is not that the President is departing — in some ways substantially, in other ways only in branding — from his predecessors’ policies. Elections have consequences, not least being that the President is Constitutionally empowered to make his own path for the country in the world. It is that the entire work of Obama’s foreign policy team smacks of chaos, freelancing, and an administration without a strong, Executive center. It speaks of a Legislator with no Executive experience playing Executive. It could as easily be John McCain, overwhelmed by the sudden chaos in the world as he was overwhelmed by the financial meltdown in September of 2008. Instead, it is Barack Obama, unable to lead on these problems while the world changes around us.

What else to make of an Administration whose Director of National Intelligence would pick a man for Chair of the National Intelligence Council who — charitably — believes that there is a Likudnik lobby of incredible breadth and scope in this country, peopled by such right-wing crazies as Charles Schumer (D-NY) and the Washington Post (D-DC)? All of the talk about triumphant neocons and the danger of criticizing Israel (invariably from the sort of folk who hate neocons and Israel) is window-dressing on the fact that the Obama White House was prepared to have as the man who coordinated intelligence directions for the entire government someone who truly believed there is a vast conspiracy in this country to advance Israel’s interests beyond those of the United States. If you prefer, the White House was prepared to have a delusional paranoid filtering and directing the intelligence process.

Or, rather, it was, until political pushback began. If there is a consistent theme coming from the aftermath of the Freeman implosion, it is that the White House utterly abandoned its personnel choice to the Congressional wolves. Was this another vetting nightmare for the White House (and if so, how did they miss James Baker’s diagnosis of “clientitis” during Freeman’s effusions over the House of Saud decades ago, or his criticism of Beijing for not rolling over enough Tiananmen protesters with tanks)? Or was it a failure of Executive will? Freeman, after all, is considered by people who agree with him to be a brilliant, multilingual analyst with an unconventional mind who, most importantly, disagreed with almost everything George W. Bush ever said, sometimes extravagantly and even bizarrely so. He is, in other words, exactly what the Party that has accused Obama’s predecessor of politicizing intelligence was looking for, to politicize intelligence in the way they find amenable. Why not fight for this man?

There is also the embarrassing spectacle of the Administration’s treatment of the Atlantic alliance. This is about neither giving the Prime Minister of Great Britain, one of our oldest and staunchest allies, a cold shoulder on his first visit to the new President; nor only the gift of a Blockbuster Best Of 25-DVD Collection some aide picked up at the last minute (no word on whether the DVDs are for Region 2); nor a miserable level of support for a global response to the planetary economic meltdown. It’s about the ridiculous “poor guy was too tired to walk and chew gum at the same time” defense. (Presumably, the family dog was too busy digesting one of the girls’ homework to be of use.) It’s about allowing State to run amok with offhand thoughts like “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.” It’s about forsaking an old, reliable alliance with one of the few militaries on Earth whom our military respects, whose presence in Afghanistan and elsewhere and whose prestige and financial muscle are of vital importance, in favor of … well, nothing, really.

And then, as always, there’s China. Playing the China game — something at which American Presidents have proven woefully bad — is a delicate dance of yielding and pushing, exploring and taking advantage of Chinese weaknesses and soft spots while continuing to enjoy the money and advantage to be made from them. It is a game that can be played by anyone able to meet threats and bluffs and feints with more of the same, so long as he has the will to play through his entire term. That will is clearly lacking. There is simply no other way to see Obama’s craven response to China’s demand that the U.S. “honor its words, stay a credible nation and ensure the safety of Chinese assets”: An immediate promise that Treasuries are safe, and a sudden change in message from America faces the worst economy of the last three thousand years, pass my budget to It’s a great economy out there, pass my budget.

This is not realism. It is weakness. It is an advertisement that the President has no idea how to ramp up his massive spending and social engineering while taking an assertive foreign policy stand, and more importantly, no will to do so. There’s no need to send Hu Jintao detailed maps showing all U.S. carrier battle groups with arrows into the Yellow Sea, then smaller arrows converging on Beijing. A simple trip by Tim Geithner to Premier Wen, bearing a message of friendship and mutual respect for China, along with the maxim, When you owe the bank a thousand dollars, it owns you; when you owe the bank $700bn, you own the bank would suffice.

The story continues in the rest of the world. Who can explain the Administration’s policy in the Indian Subcontinent and Afghanistan? (”More troops in Afghanistan” is a detail, not a policy.) How about Taiwan? The Sudan, where the much-acclaimed International Criminal Court decision to impotently indict (to cheers from the Obama Administration) its war criminal President has left hundreds of thousands on the brink of starvation, with no real response from America? Venezuela? How about Israel? After the Freeman debacle, who can say?

Does the Administration even have any serious thoughts on free trade? Or is the President just now studying this issue after two months in office and years on the campaign trail, between much-needed naps? This issue may be critically important in the months and years ahead. It’s just a thought.

This failure of leadership, in turn, has real consequences for America. We rely on mastery of the seas, on projecting power and leveraging relationships, for trade and our ability to make the world a safer place for everyone, including ourselves. Exports and imports make our lives materially wealthier. The influx of immigrants into our colleges and businesses enriches us materially and culturally. We have worked hard to establish this place in the world, and it is being slowly disintegrated by a man for whom the incredible logistics of community organizing were apparently insufficient preparation for the executive demands of the most powerful office in the world. His failure to lead abroad will slow the global response to the economic downturn, and will hearken back to the gloriously coordinated international policy response of the 1930s.

Who, exactly, is setting the United States’s foreign policy? Presumably Joe Biden, now at level 28 on BrickBreaker, may be allowed outside the country without adult supervision by 2011. Hillary Clinton, whatever her other faults, would never allow a deterioration in our relationship with the United Kingdom.

It is clearly not Barack Obama. Like John McCain in a critical moment six months ago, he is out of his depth, and is telegraphing it for all the world to see.