Looking presidential

EDITOR:

A letter appeared recently in a local paper saying that it's time to cut the president a little slack, give the man some elbow room to set things in order. He is, after all, only one man. Well, the uproar against this letter was instantaneous. Both the political right and left pilloried the author for her blind support of Obama. The left is mad at the president for the War in Afghanistan and broken promises of open government. The right is mad at him for being president in the first place. What seems odd is how so few commentators are rising to defend Obama at all.

As president, each time you stick your neck out and make an executive decision, you'll get criticized, which is one reason why Republicans tend to govern by not governing. Note the Republican slogans, "Let the market sort it out," or "Further regulation makes things worse." Now back in 2008, there was one candidate who trudged up and down the country with stories about the bad things that happen when you let insurance industries sort it out, what happens when you let mortgage lenders and banks sort it. We agreed with him, and elected that candidate by the largest margin of victory since Reagan.

We did not elect the guy who said everything could be fixed by lower taxes, and that government should stand aside and allow losers to lose and winners to win, regardless of the social consequences. We sent that guy home, and we elected the guy who said he'd aggressively try to fix the economy and health care. Trouble is, there's no template for how to repair America's portion in the global economy, or how to make it so middle-class households don't lose everything they own when they face prolonged illness. This is new turf for a president, and Obama will have to get his hands dirty proposing and modifying various solutions.

But a funny thing happened last year: We've learned that such a process does not make a President look "presidential." We've learned that a President who stands aside and does nothing looks a little classier, more "in charge." Perhaps that's because we could make believe that President Bush was doing a "strategic" nothing, rather than a "clueless" nothing.

What we've learned in Obama's first year is that it's easier to appear "in charge" by sitting on your hands and professing faith in the American spirit and the robust economy to eventually rebound. If a Republican President plays it right, doing nothing can look cautious and deliberate, not callous and indifferent. You can do nothing in the face of a crisis and appear unflinching and steely-nerved, whereas Obama looks like he's racing against the clock to find solutions that work. Of course, the reason why he looks that way, is because that's exactly what he's doing. It's because we all are. Obama's actions reflect America's genuine state of affairs, and it gives us the creeps to watch it. Seeing him scramble from crisis to crisis like a short-order cook makes you realize why both Bush Jr. and Sr. simply repeated "Stay the course" as often as they did. They made us believe that perhaps, just maybe, we could once again push our problems forward a generation or two.

Jerry Armato

Minden