WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) – Has President Barack Obama “checked out”?

It’s one thing if hardened critics like Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly ask whether the Obama presidency is “imploding,” as she did last month, citing a string of foreign policy debacles and domestic scandals.

Or if Republican lobbyist Ed Rogers says Obama “seems to have taken something like an early retirement,” as he did in his Washington Post blog earlier this month, finding that the president’s recent speeches reveal “a state of mind that suggests he has checked out.”

It is another, however, if the chief U.S. commentator for the Financial Times, Edward Luce, takes Obama to task, as he did this week, in an op-ed titled “Farewell to trust: Obama’s Germany syndrome.”

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Luce takes the flap over the CIA spying on an ally like Germany as symptomatic of an administration that has lost the trust of the public both at home and abroad.

The British journalist notes that Obama dismisses such charges as cynical, but Luce rejects that label for himself and other critics in the press.

“Most reporters are better described as skeptical,” Luce says. “A cynic believes there is nothing new under the sun. A skeptic resists gullibility. On the basis of the latter, Mr. Obama does not appear to relish being chief executive.”

Kelly dismissively refers to Obama’s response to crisis as “smiling, golfing and at this very moment partying,” but Luce, too, notes that Obama has played golf 179 times while in office, much more than avowed golf lover George W. Bush, and headlined 393 fundraisers, more than double his predecessor’s total.

“If Mr. Obama put half as much effort into co-opting or wrong-footing his opponents as he does raising cash from the wealthy, people might be less skeptical,” Luce writes.

Veteran journalist Patrick Smith, who has written for liberal publications like The Nation and the New Yorker, also takes Obama to task for the German spy scandal and the insufficient response by American officials.

“I can think of two names for this,” Smith wrote this week in Fiscal Times. “One is ‘outmoded arrogance.’ The other is ‘asleep at the wheel.’ Whatever the moniker, some measure of incompetence lies behind it.”

When MSNBC anchor Mika Brzezinski interviewed Obama last month on the subject of Iraq, network commentator Donny Deutsch, an avowed Democrat, said, “I’ve never seen a less-engaged look in his eyes.”

Deutsch added: “He almost seemed — I don’t want to say checked-out because that is not the right thing — but watching him, his cadence was different. He feels like he almost wants to go home at this point.”

Another commentator on that program, Mark Halperin, said that Obama’s answers on the Syrian situation were nuanced and accurate, but people expect more from a president than great analysis of problems.

“It’s up to the president of the United States to take some bold action to try to address them,” said Halperin, co-author of “Game Change,” the bestselling book on the 2008 presidential campaign, “and not just sit and say here’s why this is hard, here’s why this is hard.”

The White House rejects this criticism as unfair, and no doubt some of it is. They say Obama is now jetting around the country to escape Beltway “cynicism” and connect with real Americans.

That may be, but no matter how many cheering crowds he addresses, it doesn’t seem to be helping his approval ratings.

The average of current polls at Real Clear Politics shows Obama’s approval rating sinking to 41.6, from above 44 two months ago. More significant, perhaps, is that the gap between those who disapprove and those who approve has widened to 12 points from just 7.

Unfair or not, the narrative of a president who has checked out is building momentum, and not just in the opposition press. Nor is there any sign that Obama intends to do anything about it, or even wants to.

That is why one Washington insider publication, The Hill, ran a story this week under the headline “Obama the pariah” and an unambiguous lead: “Democrats in tough reelection races have a blunt message for President Obama: Keep away.”

Checked out or evicted, either way, we seem to be entering what Rogers called “the world of the post-Obama presidency.”

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