Maybe I’m being a little too dismissive, but I don’t think it’s necessary to deal with the particulars of Leslie Gelb’s column in today’s Daily Beast, since its main idea patently ridiculous:

The negative, even dismissive, talk about the Obama White House has reached a critical point. The president must change key personnel now. Unless he speedily sets up a new team, he will be reduced to a speechmaker. It’s mostly a matter of relocating the Chicago and campaign crowd who surround the Oval Office and inserting people with proven records of getting things done in Washington and the world.

I still don’t quite get why this is so hard to understand, but here goes: considering the circumstances — high unemployment and a sluggish economy — Barack Obama is almost remarkably popular. Obama began the year with an approval rating of 50 percent, and at the moment, his approval rating rests at a comfortable 53 percent. More importantly, his disapproval is isolated to a few regions and a few demographics. Obama sees his highest disapproval ratings among men and women 50 and older, the vast majority of which are almost certainly white and concentrated in the regions where his approval is lowest: the Southwest, the Southeast and the Rocky Mountain area. What’s more, the most recent New York Times/CBS poll suggests that the majority of Americans hold the GOP responsible for legislative gridlock, and sees Obama as understanding their problems and concerns.

Far from being a liability, Barack Obama’s political team is an unqualified success. Despite the dismal economic news, Obama is still popular, and insofar that the public is upset with Barack Obama, it has less to do with the substance of his agenda and everything to do the sense that Obama isn’t doing enough to improve the economy (52 percent of respondents say that Obama has done “too little” to “fix the nation’s economy and create jobs).  Even then, the problem lies more with Congress than it does with the president. To borrow from Jon Chait, “the congressional arm of the Democratic Party remains mired in fecklessness, parochialism, and privilege.” Congressional Democrats are too busy running away from the president to see that their best bet for saving themselves is to pass the president’s agenda.

The short of it is that Gelb is completely off-base. Obama won’t gain anything from firing his staff, and he might even hurt his popularity by doing so (see: Jimmy Carter). The only way Barack Obama and the Democratic Party can harness public opinion and salvage November is by passing some damn bills (and chief among them is the damn bill).

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