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I heartily agreed with David Brooks earlier this month, when at the end of an op-ed about public dignity, he praised the President for exemplifying “reticence, dispassion and the other traits associated with dignity.” The President has the well-deserved reputation for being the coolest-headed (and plain coolest) guy in the room, and usually conducts himself with a kind of sobriety and reserve that is in short supply in American politics.

But there’s an exception to this, and a huge one, that Brooks misses completely: those times when, as with the lead-up to the passage of the stimulus bill, Obama takes to the stump and revives his “perpetual campaign“, traveling to a series of town halls and rallies, rolling up his sleeves, loosening his tie, and essentially mortgaging his personal popularity for support on key policy issues.

He’s doing it again this week, publicly stumping for a health care bill that is–excuse the bad pun–on life support right now.

Now, every politician does this sort of pandering, but not every politician is crowned by a leading (opposition!) pundit as an exemplar of dignity. And what makes it worse is that Obama isn’t even glad-handing on issues where his administration has shown any real leadership. On health care, as with the stimulus and cap-and-trade, Obama has farmed out the heavy-lifting to the Democratic establishment in Congress, and hasn’t sent as much as a cocktail napkin worth of legislative language their way.

I don’t know why the President is so disengaged from the legislative process. Maybe he has a really old-fashioned view of the separation of powers; maybe he is positioning himself to avoid taking any blame for legislative failures. Needless to say, giving a Democrat supermajority a blank check to radically expand the size of government via unfunded or underfunded expenditures is not a recipe for reform. Neither is Obama wise to fail to engage the centrist Democrats and Republicans who are queasy about a $1 trillion public option. His failure of leadership has resulted in creating the kind of dilemma we’ll see over and over again from this Congress unless something changes: they can either pass a watered-down compromise bill that is too big to be affordable and too small to actually work (like the stimulus) or no bill at all.

Moreover, it seems like the American people are finally getting wise to the President’s wishy-washy leadership on Health care. His approval ratings on the issue have dipped below 50%. Maybe that will be a wake-up call to a President who has for too long been coasting on our high-opinion.