President Obama was on the way to Alpha when a plea came for him to be, well, more alpha.
LuAnn Lavine, a real estate agent from Geneseo, a rural town just up the road from Alpha, Ill., the last stop on the president’s Midwestern bus tour, told The Times’s Jeff Zeleny: “Everyone was so hopeful with him, but Washington grabbed him and here we are. I just want him to stay strong and don’t take the guff. We want a president who is a leader, and I want him to be a little bit stronger.” Hers was a gentler message than the sign stuck on a post outside Alpha: “One Term President.” But her three words summed it up: Washington grabbed him. Why did this man whose contempt for Congress is clear, who ran on the idea that he could transform a broken Washington, surrender to its conventional timetable and bureaucratic language? The “supercommittee” that’s supposed to save us just sounds like more government bloat — supersizing something just as unhealthy as McDonald’s. Is Obama so isolated he can’t see that Americans are curled up in a ball, beaten down by a financial crisis, an identity crisis, a political crisis and a leadership crisis? He got the job by blaming Washington. But once you’re in the White House, you are Washington. It’s like the plumber who came to fix the sink waiting for the sink to fix itself. I covered the first President Bush when he took a slide from Iraq war hero to one-term president. A turning point came in the fall of 1991, when Americans were getting jittery about the economy. Conservatives urged Bush to adopt an aggressive agenda and a muscular stance toward Congress. But relying on the disastrous advice of his budget adviser Richard Darman, Bush waited for more than a month until the State of the Union address and repackaged the same tepid agenda. President Obama bashed Congress on his bus tour. But after delegating to Congress time and again with disastrous results, he continues to play the satellite to Congress. He shouldn’t be driven by the Washington schedule. He should be setting it. At long last, he promised a clear economic plan. Unfortunately, he had the fierce urgency of next month, when Congress gets back to town. Americans are rattled and want action. They don’t know or care what Congress’s schedule is. They just see the president not doing anything. Cruising white Midwestern hamlet in his black bus, Obama tried to justify not calling lawmakers back to D.C. by saying they’d just continue to bicker. But what does he think they’ll do in September? The truth is, he doesn’t want them back in the capital any more than they want to be back. It would have screwed up his vacation and upset Michelle, who already feels trapped in the Washington bubble. If Clinton wanted to be president 25 hours a day and W. wanted to be president four hours a day, Obama wants to be president for about 14 hours a day. And that’s fine, as long as you don’t look like you’re phoning it in when the country is dialing 911. White House officials must be worried about the 10-day Martha’s Vineyard idyll because, in a rare move, they put out a picture of the president with furrowed brow and Nike shirt getting a briefing from John Brennan, his top counterterrorism adviser. There were no pictures allowed of him at the Vineyard Golf Club, only shots of the president shopping for books with his daughters. He was seen in the Bunch of Grapes bookstore on Friday holding “Brave New World.” Maybe he was brushing up on dystopias and alphas. He might also want to pick up a volume of Robert Frost for some insight on why Democrats waste time trying to reconcile with ruthless foes. The president still believes he can use his enchanting powers to convert the other side, even though Republicans regard every Obama legislative achievement as the beginning of a campaign to recall it. Heck, they’re still trying to repeal the New Deal. Obama was truly stung by his budget experience with John Boehner. And now, Senator Tom Coburn, whom Obama called “not only a dear friend, but also a brother in Christ” at February’s National Prayer Breakfast, tells a town hall in Oklahoma that Obama’s views are “goofy and wrong,” and that the president wants to “create dependency” because “as an African-American male,” he had received “tremendous benefit” from government programs. There is no way to sell the idea that being a black man in America gives you tremendous benefit. How does Obama feel after his brother in Christ painted him as something akin to a welfare queen and an affirmative-action president? Let us take today’s lesson from Frost, who deliciously wrote in “The Lesson for Today”: I’m liberal. You, you aristocrat, Won’t know exactly what I mean by that. I mean so altruistically moral I never take my own side in a quarrel.
