It’s not really a review of David Maraniss’s new book, Barack Obama: The Story.

You could say Obama water carrier Buzzfeed Ben Smith’s article, “The Real Story Of Barack Obama,” is more of an apologetic directed at Obama’s “enemies” — although Smith does discuss the “two strands of falsehood” Obama spun in his 1995 autobiograpy, Dreams from My Father. Smith writes:

And the truth might not be quite as interesting as the president, and his enemies, have imagined.

The operative word here is “imagined”. We’ll give him this much: Barack Obama is a great imagineer who would fit right in with all the professional fairy tale interpreters at Walt Disney World in Orlando.

William A. Jacobson of the Legal Insurrection blog succinctly nails it: “We elected a fiction.”

Regarding the current presidential election, Michael Goodwin writes in “O invents own legend” at the New York Post:

Watching President Obama flop around like a fish out of water, careening from gaffe to desperation to dishonesty, I find myself searching for ways to put his troubling behavior into historic perspective.

Is this The Unmaking of a President? Or is it The Unmasking? Perhaps we are witnessing an American Tragedy. Or maybe we’re seeing final proof his election was The Great Mistake.

All those fit the facts, and lead to a shared conclusion. So far, the 2012 election has almost nothing to do with Mitt Romney. Even the GOP doesn’t love its choice, but the race is a dead heat because Obama is so disappointing.

His fall from grace does more than merely confirm the conventional wisdom that elections are a referendum on the incumbent. Notwithstanding White House efforts to make the race about something or someone else, Obama remains the straw that stirs the drink.

But what a strange straw he is. Far stranger than we knew.

The man who campaigned against the “torture” of war prisoners boasts of killing suspects while taking no prisoners. He called rising debts “un-American” before setting a new record for borrowing. He railed against the imperial presidency before stretching it beyond recognition. The former law-school instructor tried to bully the Supreme Court.

Just who is Barack Obama? The question lingers like an itch that can’t be scratched.

Also, just in case you had not seen the oh-so-apt image above before, it was created by Linda Eddy. I used it frequently four years ago — in April 2008 — at my RezkoWatch blog. (Archived here.)

Eddy’s new-and-improved 2012 version is spot on: