World Afire, Obama and Congress Head Off to Vacation

As regular readers of this blog know, I campaigned hard for the President.  I liked his passion and thought he had good ideas and a mandate to implement them.  Now I see the stock market in free fall, unemployment at ridiculously high levels and an economy that is brittle.  It's now that he decides to take the family up to Martha's Vineyard.

He has an opportunity at this point in time to be a real leader, to sieze the moment as Churchill or a Roosevelt and give people hope in the face of overwhelming despair.  Now is the time to stand up and try something, anything to get this economy turned around.  Big ideas or small, a pat on the hand or a pep talk, he absolutely must be the leader we elected him to be.  We need a steady hand at the rudder, a calming influence and the hope that things are going to get better.

Maureen Dowd has reffered to him as President Spock and this decision confirms his aloofness.  A lot of the people who lost jobs in 2008-2009 still haven't found work and those that kept their jobs haven't seen their wages come back.  Now it looks like we could be entering those dark days again and here's what we get from this White House:

Press secretary Jay Carney defended Obama's plans to take a break even as he's pledged urgent action on those issues.

"I don't think Americans out there would begrudge that notion that the president would spend some time with his family," Carney said.

I do begrudge him that time.  He needs a little Clinton gravitas, a little of that old "I feel your pain".  We're still waiting, after three years, for things to get better.  I know the Republicans are working against him but that's the name of the game.  That's politics.  They aren't going to work with him so he has to learn to go through them or around them.  If he won't learn that one simple lesson, to stand up and fight for what he believes, he needs to forget re-election and let Hillary Clinton get into a primary fight. 

Finally, the only way he could have been more elitist in choosing his vacation destination would have been to announce that James Taylor would be serenading the whole family on the beach around a bonfire.  If he has to go somewhere, go to a depressed area where all that vacation money would do some good.  A tour of the Lake Erie shoreline gives you Presque Isle, Cedar Point, Geneva-on-the-Lake, Kalahari Waterpark and other attractions.  There's no harm in coming out to see the folks he leads and how we spend our vacations.