I’ve seen more than a few presidents. A very few, like John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, were good men and good leaders. Some, like Jimmy Carter, were good people whose personal style was not suited to the demands of the job. Some, like George Bush Jr., were principled men but allowed their egos and emotions to over-ride their judgment and alienated people. And then there were the pure politicians, completely lacking in principle. In that category I would place Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. One was eventually forced to resign and the other came within an ace of the same fate.

But President Obama takes the cake. Not only does he lack principle, but, unlike Nixon and Clinton, he is also a weak leader. A prime example of this is his continuing mistreatment of Paul Volcker.

The president needed the gravitas of the former Fed chairman to sell his bank reform to Wall Street. But when the big banks didn’t buy it, Obama sold him out.

Barack Obama owes Paul Volcker a lot, but he apparently owes the fat cats on Wall Street even more. That’s the only reasonable conclusion that can be made from the president’s timely and, in some ways, bizarre about-face on the former Fed chairman’s plans to reform the financial industry and prevent another meltdown.

As first reported by the New York Post, Volcker’s bank-reform idea—the one trotted out by the president with Volcker standing at his side just hours after Republican Scott Brown won Teddy Kennedy’s seat and vowed to help crush Obama’s economic agenda—has been nixed in favor of a watered-down version that bank chiefs like J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and other Obama supporters on Wall Street are advocating.