Written By Larry
2010-06-18T15:41:00Z
Consider the following two items:
- President Obama's approval ratings have declined, in part because of the Gulf oil spill. Everybody expects him to do something, but I have yet to hear anybody say exactly what he can do to plug the hole and put everything back the way it was. Obviously, there's nothing the President (any President) can do in a situation like this, but everybody wants him to be Daddy and fix it. (For the record, I think Bush the Younger got something of a raw deal with Hurricane Katrina, too. He just happened to be the lucky one in office when decades of bad federal decisions met the hurricane from hell.)
- According to this story in the Los Angeles Times, his ratings in the Muslim world have declined, apparently because of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The fact that this conflict has been raging since at least 1947, has roots going back many years before that, and has defied the efforts of Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II to somehow solve it is, apparently, irrelevant.
It's extremely unlikely that anybody will ever attempt to get me to run for President, but given the above, were someone to try, I think I'd run as fast as possible in the opposite direction. Frankly, I wouldn't blame the President if he sometimes thinks he should have remained a senator. You only have to run every six years, you can serve for life if you can manage to get re-elected, and you get to be the one sniping instead of the one being sniped at.