Many Americans love the picture Barack Obama paints when he speaks. A country not of red or blue states, but of United States; factories will never close down again, millions will be employed in “green technologies”, the middle class will grow, our troops will come home from Iraq with no negative impact on U.S. security, health care will be cheaper, rogue states and hostile dictators will make concessions at the negotiating table, and he’ll usher in a “new spirit of cooperation and innovation on behalf of the American people.”

You can’t argue with that happy, blue skies, birds-chirping smiley-face future Obama paints. Americans want to believe in it. Republicans can’t be the ones saying, “No, we can’t.”

But they can say, “No, he can’t.”

Obama’s vision is Utopian, and not only do those visions never come to pass, they usually involve massive amounts of human misery in the attempt. Beyond that, nothing in Obama’s background suggests he would be up to the Herculean tasks he is pledging to accomplish. He is a great orator, seemingly a nice guy, a bright enough fellow with some modest achievements in law and the state legislature. He’s a very skilled campaigner.

But leading as President isn’t the same as campaigning. And that’s why this comment from Fox’s Bill Hemmer spotlights that soft underbelly:

We had a show last night where Frank Luntz had a great group of 30 New Yorkers here in the studio down the street here and they watched both ads and they actually liked the Obama ad more than the Clinton ad. They love Obama and they love everything he says, but they could not name anything he has done, which brings us back to the issue for Obama.

Obama is campaigning as a blank slate, but his record as a legislator in the Senate and the state level suggests he’s a man with the best of intentions and most meager of accomplishments, particularly in ‘bridging the partisan divide.’

Obama is asking the American people to believe he can do the near-impossible, when he has yet to accomplish the possible.