The Obama Holiday Tour
Happy holidays! This is one of those times of year when families and friends can forget their troubles and join together for a Passover seder, as President Obama did on Thursday, or commemorate Easter with the traditional egg hunt, as President Obama will do on Monday. Americans with less religious inclinations can look forward to the upcoming Earth Day celebrations, when the president is planning to do something as yet unannounced, but undoubtedly special, and Arbor Day, when rumor has it that he will not just plant a tree, but personally reforest a large swath of the nation of Mali.
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The president is back from his eight-day overseas trip, where, by my count, he visited six countries, held 25 meetings, eight variations on the theme of press conference and two town halls. He attended three summits and several receptions, gave two speeches, laid a wreath, walked across a bridge, took several tours of spots of local interest and made a quick stop in Iraq before arriving home in time for that seder.
In these troubling times, it's comforting to have an omnipresent leader, although we are a little worried about the fact that in the Czech Republic, his press secretary felt compelled to wake Obama up to tell him that North Korea had launched their missile. After all, everybody knew it was going to happen and the missile did fall into the sea shortly after it left the ground.
Was it just because of that old Hillary Clinton campaign commercial? Was the administration afraid to admit that when it was 3 a.m. in the White House (or 4:30 a.m. at the Prague Hilton, if you're being literal) and the phone rang, the president wasn't awake to pick up the receiver?
This seems like a bad precedent. I think I speak for us all when I say they should at least reserve the knock on the bedroom door for successful missile launches.
The poor man needs his sleep. So much stuff keeps happening. Pirates, for instance. Right now we're concerned with the fate of the kidnapped captain of the container ship the Maersk Alabama. Over the long haul, you also have to be disconcerted by the news that the crew of the Alabama thwarted the pirates' attempts to steal the vessel itself by using strategies that one of the officers learned from his father, who teaches a course on how to repel pirate attacks at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy.
Who knew that the academy curriculum includes pirate control? This is the kind of thing that makes you realize how important it is to have a president who is both a multitasker and well rested.
The president stays on the move because he knows we're looking for reassurance. We scan the news every day for signs and portents that tell us what's going to happen next. Does the stock market upswing mean the economy is getting better or just that Wall Street is still full of people with the long-range vision of a bunch of overstimulated hamsters?
Now a little caution when it comes to awarding honors is not a bad thing -- I am thinking of the haste at which my hometown of Cincinnati christened a major street Pete Rose Way in honor of a baseball hero whose body of work was soon going to include being banned from the Hall of Fame due to gambling issues. But really, getting elected to the most powerful job on the planet seems to be a pretty good lifetime resume, no matter what comes next. Particularly when, as Sam Stein of The Huffington Post pointed out, you are a university that already handed a degree to the vice minister of education of the People's Republic of China and the founder of Forever Living health and beauty aids.
Maybe Obama will celebrate the Fourth of July by setting off fireworks in every state of the union. Even the ones that make him bring his own sparklers.