Peggy Noonan: Obama didn't sound resolute, he sounded plaintive, like someone doing a sound check in an empty hall he knows will never fill.

Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal:

President Obama's jobs bill failed in the Senate this week, and the headline is not that it lost, it's that it lost and nobody noticed. Polls actually showed support for various parts of it. You know why it failed? Because he was for it. Because he said, "Pass this bill." So weak is public faith in his economic leadership that people figure if he's behind it, it must be a bad idea. After the bill failed, the president said he won't accept defeat: He and the American people "won't take no for an answer." Why does he talk like that, in a way so removed from reality? He didn't sound resolute, he sounded plaintive, like someone doing a sound check in an empty hall he knows will never fill.