A Lack of Leadership

Reading Biographies of Harry Truman and Theodore Roosevelt is bad for your belief in the modern day Presidency. How our current President can look at the polls and change not just the fringes of his thought process but the core of it is remarkable.

There are modern day realities in all administrations. All campaign promises are suspect when the President does not have a working majority in office but this President seems to shy away from a fight.

For all his supposed admiration of Ronald Reagan's communication style he fails in following it. Reagan when confronted with an unruly or unwilling Congress would go over their heads to the American people. This President sets high level goals and then lets the Democrats in Congress come up with a bill.

Republicans often realize that Evangelicals will vote Republican even if they are less than thrilled with the Republican candidate. Obama seems to calculate that Democrats, especially Union Democrats will have nowhere to go but to him in 2012. He is correct, any union member voting Republican now needs to have his head examined. In fact a groundswell of union anger across the Midwest might well energize the Democratic base like nothing Obama could do. That said it will not be earned. From a campaign promise to walk the picket lines with workers to running away and trying to keep the same amount of distance from union that Superman had to keep from kryptonite has been a shameful exercise.

Obama is what we are stuck with for better or worse. Certainly anybody the Republicans come up with will be a much worse choice. Let us hope that somewhere along the line Obama becomes comfortable being a Democrat. That he realized that being an elitist President of a working class party makes a mockery of all the things he has claimed in the past to stand for.

President Obama. Take a doubleshot of courage, smoke a pack of cigarettes and LEAD!