You can read for yourself the self-revealing chapter the president wrote about his community organizing in Chicago. When he realizes that he has failed to achieve results, he goes off to Harvard Law School to fill in the gaps of his knowledge.

"I would learn about the way businesses and banks were put together; how real estate ventures succeeded or failed," he writes. "I would learn power's currency in all its intricacy and detail."

So now he takes tutelage from Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard, and Timothy Geithner, the former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The president may still think of himself as a learner, albeit armed with "power's currency," but his teachers have become as courtiers to please rather than challenge, as effectual as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. How else to explain such mammoth excesses in his new budget?

Hamlet, of course, was never "called to govern." The prince was too young, too inexperienced to assume power. Endless vacillation was his undoing. Had he become an authentic leader, the Danes would have wished him well, just as Americans want Barack Obama to do well. "Every American loves this country and wants it to succeed," the president says. But a lot of us think he's really not very interested in bridging the gap of partisanship, despite the pretty speeches.

A small but dramatic example illustrates: Sarah and James Parker attend Sidwell Friends School in Washington with the Obama girls. But unlike Malia and Sasha, whose tuition is paid by their parents, they're part of a tiny District of Columbia voucher program that enables them, along with 1,700 other low-income children, to take $7,500 of public school money to a private school of their choice. The House adopted an amendment to a spending bill last week to eliminate this program, forcing these 1,700 children back to inferior public schools. The Senate could forestall this, by requiring the program be studied for its effectiveness.

Obama says he supports charter schools, not vouchers for private schools. Authentic bipartisanship could defend the voucher program, but the teachers' unions, to whom the president and his party owe their jobs, are determined to protect their monopoly on mediocrity. The temptation to continue campaigning is hard to resist.