Leslie H. Gelb, Numero Uno CFR honcho, has a brusque, prescriptive piece in Tina Brown’s Daily Beast on what Obama needs to do: Move Rahm, fire Gibbs, and Axelrod, and Jim Jones, and Larry Summers — and replace them with, er, Erskine Bowles, Paul Volcker, and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

As Gelb concedes, this may be unfair:

It’s not clear whether the bad judgments on priorities, practicalities, and steadiness come from Mr. Obama or his White House team. Maybe he overpowers them in discussions, or maybe he gives them a role in policymaking far beyond their experience in that realm. Unless you’re there, you don’t know. But Mr. Obama is the president, and except for the right-wing crazies, most Americans still recognize his great talents and promise. It is he who’s got to be helped. So it is they who’ve got to go.

And preferably in the next 20 minutes:

Unless he speedily sets up a new team, he will be reduced to a speechmaker.

To which Jennifer Rubin, with admirable restraint, responds:

We can quibble with the tense of that sentence, but he has a point.

As Miss Rubin notes, all of Gelb’s elaborate diagnosis for rearranging the bar stewards on the Titanic overlooks the nature of the crisis:

Gelb’s argument boils down to the hope that better aides can substitute for a competent president. But we know that’s not how it works. There is one president who must decide between often conflicting advice. There is one president who can connect — or not — with Middle America and roll up his sleeves to make deals with opponents. And only the president can give up the pipe dream of engaging despots.

This is the problem: Barack Obama is not up to the job. Which many of us pointed out a year and a half ago. What was less forseeable is that he’s so not up to the job he’s surrounded himself by people who are not up to their jobs.

Put to one side the necessary precondition of Gelb’s diagnosis — that the president has some hitherto unknown advisers who can advise him to get rid of his very closest advisers — and imagine what would happen if he got his way, and Obama brought in all these wise old birds. For as Gelb says:

70 and even 80 are the new 60.

And Obama’s 48 is what, the new 12? Underneath its supposed “realist” practicality and its discreet evasions, Gelb’s assumptions are remarkable: He sees the president not as the chief executive required by the job, nor even as a weak prime minister chairing a collegial cabinet of all the talents, but as a callow boy-king plunked down on the throne who requires a regency of wizened old viziers around him to prevent the whole operation jumping the tracks.

And, as Gelb notes, this is the analysis not of “right-wing crazies” but of a well-wisher.