Matthew Yglesias makes an important point on Tapped:

I read Newsweek’s story on Bush in a bubble with interest, and so should you. The basic storyline is something we’ve read before at occasional rough spots for the president, but this article adds some new details. To me, though, the most interesting thing is that this is also a storyline we’ve heard at the high points of the Bush years. Except when Bush is riding high, the stories don’t talk about a “bubble”; they talk about “decisive leadership,” “moral clarity” and so forth.

That’s ultimately why I don’t think these stories should be taken too seriously. In essence, they reflect top-tier political reporters’ aversion to writing or thinking about policy. Each president has his own personality and management style that, especially with the help of a little exaggeration, can be turned into a vivid explanation of why the president is so great or why he’s so terrible. When he was popular, Bush’s idiosyncrasies were a positive factor, and now that he’s unpopular, they’re seen as negative. At the end of the day, though, to understand what’s wrong with the White House you need to understand the policies the White House is pursuing — they’re bad ones, characterized by a commitment to an unrealistic vision of the Middle East and an economic policy driven entirely by the economic interests of the Republican Party’s major donors. Chit-chatting with a wider circle of people wouldn’t change that, especially since the vast majority of conservatives don’t seem to have a real problem with either of those things. (my bold)

This is the same phenomenon that led to reporters explaining the 2004 election as reflecting John Kerry’s lack of authenticity rather than more systematic factors such as a post-9/11 effect in which voters prioritized the war on terror. Like the Marxists who tried to use class to explain everything, reporters will gamely seek to explain almost any political outcome as resulting from politicians’ personalities, the one subject on which they are unquestioned experts and cannot be proven wrong.