Is anyone else starting to sour on Barack Obama?

In his comments on the Virginia Tech shooting, he laments the kind of violence that isn’t… well, violent:

“There’s also another kind of violence that we’re going to have to think about. It’s not necessarily the physical violence, but the violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways,” he said, and goes on to catalogue other forms of “violence.”
There’s the “verbal violence” of Imus.
There’s “the violence of men and women who have worked all their lives and suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job is moved to another country.”
There’s “the violence of children whose voices are not heard in communities that are ignored,”
And so, Obama says, “there’s a lot of different forms of violence in our society, and so much of it is rooted in our incapacity to recognize ourselves in each other.”

Speaking of “verbal violence”, there’s a certain verbal abuse going on when we use a term that has a specific meaning – exertion of physical force so as to injure or abuse – and we apply it to acts and phenomenon that have no physical force, but we simply don’t like. Imus’ comments were obnoxious, but they are not “verbal violence.” A layoff can be a supremely painful experience, but it is not violence.

(This is what leads to terms like the “war on poverty” or the “war on drugs”, policies that are are not wars. Campaign “war rooms” are not actually fighting wars. When “Nazi” and “fascism” are synonyms for “policies and people I don’t like,” then the words become meaningless.)

By talking about layoffs and shock-jock radio, Obama is essentially conceding, “I don’t want to talk about Virginia Tech, so I’m going to talk about the issues that I’m comfortable with.” Mickey Kaus is a little off-base — it’s not his audience’s comfort zone that Obama refuses to leave; it’s his own.

UPDATE: Jeff Dobbs has more in this vein, and I largely concur. Obama’s so charismatic and deliberately respectful of his opponents that I want to like him. But stuff like this makes him look like not a better politician, just a smoother one; he seems like he’s typically willing to use a tragic news event as an opportunity to call for his preferred policy proposals, even if they’re not even remotely connected to the event.