“Memba back in the day when the MSM excoriated George Bush for heading down to Crawford, where he basically did the job of President while doing some manly things around the ranch? Or flipped out over some rounds of golf? Yeah, not so much anymore, where Washington Post writer Anne Kornblut seems to be saying “sheesh, why can’t the world just stop for a bit so this guy can take a proper vacation?”
Traveling as president has its advantages: no traffic to the airport, a cadre of personal flight attendants and a luxury aircraft that takes off whenever the passenger in chief wants.
But as President Obama has discovered, there is also a downside.
Trying to schedule a vacation — or even a weekend away — has proven next-to-impossible for the first family; world events keep conspiring to mess up their plans. Their vacation in Hawaii over Christmas was pushed back because of the health-care debate. Two months later the same issue forced the Obamas to cancel a family trip to Indonesia over spring break. And all three of the president’s most recent foreign trips — including voyages to Asia and Copenhagen — have been rearranged or postponed at the last minute.
It should have come as no surprise, then, that soon after the Obamas announced plans to spend a long Memorial Day weekend in Chicago, a massive oil spill that for weeks had been lurking off the Gulf Coast finally made landfall, wiping out birds and fish, mucking up the shoreline and driving round-the-clock cable news coverage.
You mean things keep happening that require the attention of the POTUS? How rude!
The long-awaited Chicago visit comes at the end of a week of “horrible karma,” one adviser noted, with the oil spill, the collapsing European economy, an escalating crisis on the Korean Peninsula and, on Wednesday, a stock market that closed below 10,000 for the first time in months. (“At least Elena Kagan is doing fine,” joked the adviser, referring to the president’s Supreme Court nominee.) Perhaps his Chicago friends are in on it: the last time Obama set out to spend vacation time with his inner hometown circle, over Christmas in Hawaii, a young Nigerian man tried to bring down an airplane with a bomb in his underwear.
Look, Obama works hard, what with all the golf, the parties with Beyonce, basketball, campaign rallies, dissing allies, offering bribes. We just need to give the guy a break and let someone else deal with all the issues that come with the job.
