Professor-in-Chief

Whether he's dealing with healthcare reform, nominating a Supreme Court justice, trying to forge peace in the Middle East or attempting to dig out of the economic mess he helped create as a U.S. senator, President Obama sticks to his professor's manual in how he handles the crisis at hand.

Five months into his presidency, Obama has exhibited a signature way of approaching every issue. First, the Speech -- more commonly known as a lecture in classroom parlance. In the Speech, he lays out some general guidelines or objectives and then pulls at the heartstrings with poignant anecdotes.

Next, the Assignment. Usually this is directed at Congress. But Obama has been known to make assignments to industry, agencies, associations and even Israel. On the heels of assigning homework, the president sets an arbitrary due date. And then like any good professor, he leaves the students to complete the project on their own.

While this method may work in the classroom, it is disastrous in government. Remember the "stimulus" package? Rushing to meet the president's due date, Democrats pushed through a thousand pages of spending proposals that no one -- including Professor President -- had a chance to review or evaluate. The Democrats are doing the same thing with Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court. For them, it is more important to meet Obama's deadline than it is to do a full-blown, meaningful review.

Meanwhile, the president gave them another assignment today: Come up with legislation to set a cap on executive pay at all publically traded companies. It will be interesting to see if any of the congressional Democrats question the teacher on this one.

Or perhaps by now the brighter students have figured out that this type of tutorial government leads to one result: The president/professor takes all the credit and the students in Congress get all the failing grades.