Further evidence that the thrill is gone for President Obama, from my friend Aaron Connelly’s Indonesia-based blog:

Earlier today, Jakarta Governor Fauzi Bowo authorized the removal of a recently erected statue of Barack Obama as a child, from its current spot in a park in the city’s classy old Menteng neighborhood to the nearby school that he attended. The order followed the creation of a Facebook group campaigning for the statue to be torn down. Newspapers and television stations here reported on the group extensively, and newswires picked it up and sent it global. After all that attention, the group’s membership soared to over 50,000 members.

The story has been played back home– and will no doubt be played again today– as an amusing piece of news that sums up succinctly the narrative which the media has settled on for President Obama’s current predicament: fading enthusiasm for the president, even in his old strongholds like Menteng and Massachusetts! The Facebook group creators have been quoted arguing that Obama has not yet accomplished enough for a statue to have been erected in his honor, which of course sounds like an echo to anyone who has turned on FoxNews since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in September.

The permutations of clever leads are endless. The blog Ironic Surrealism remarked when the news of the group broke: “Obama is not only falling off of his pedestal here in the US. In Indonesia where he spent a few years as a child, he may soon be literally knocked off of his pedestal.”