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The White House hasn’t called me lately to get my views on what the president should be doing, so I’m not fooling myself that what I am writing will do any good. Here goes anyway.
Obama is making a big mistake by taking a vacation in Hawaii. It is just too damn far and sends the wrong message for a president to be enjoying ice cream cones by the road while the country is still in a deep recession (even though the top part of the economy has coming flying out of it). The more important question: what happens if some national emergency occurs while he is in Hawaii?
To put it plainly, Obama is putting his entire presidency at risk by taking a break in Hawaii. Since he spent a good part of his childhood there, it probably means a great deal for him to go there and take his family, especially his daughters, to beautiful, warm Hawaii. It ain’t Chicago, baby, where the wind comes whipping down the streets and feels like 50 MPH icicle being jammed into your back this time of year.
Hawaii is certainly not DC, either, where the ugly partisan battles with Congress threaten to dominate the agenda for the entire 2011 calendar. As they say, I get it. I understand the need to get away and I like to do it myself. (Hey, I’m not the prez and virtually no one counts on me, can you imagine?, to reassure them in a time of national emergency.)
What happens if there is a truly major terrorist attack while he is away? How does he “project leadership” from some small, rented hotel space with a camera put in place ten minutes before he arrives? How does he show the nation he’s in charge and on top of the situation? The answer is that he doesn’t or he does so in a way that defeats the overall message. Not good.
The worst part in an emergency would be to “lose” the president while he is flying back. Hawaii is really far away. It is more than two thousand miles from LA, which means it is close to five thousand miles from DC. At max cruise, he will be nine to eleven hours away from the place where his command is most symbolically and actually carried out: the White House. If he were to fly non-stop, that would mean he would be out of touch (not with the situation, but with the nation) for that entire period of time.
What’s he going to do, stop in LA and make some platitudinous statement, get back on the big 747 and fly for another five hours? Please. Maybe Biden can run to the White House pressroom and say, “We, personally, are in charge here at the White House.” Does he know to make sure he’s caught his breath first?
Ditch the Hawaii dream. We all make sacrifices. When my daughter was growing up, there were many places I wanted to take her and share with the family, but we only got to do some of them, not even half of what I had hoped. That’s life. We’ve got some really nice islands also in the American stable that are much closer, including Puerto Rico and the Virgins. A president could hop back from one of those in less than four hours.
Last year, we had the would be bomber on Christmas day. An aircraft falling from the sky in ten thousand pieces would not have affected the country nearly so much as the 2001 attacks, but it would be a traumatic, important event, one where the words and actions of the president would count ten to a hundred times more than in an ordinary time. He can’t show those vital leadership qualities in casual clothes coming in from the beach or, much worse, if he is confined to an aluminum tube at 50,000 ft. humping it back to the capital.
Being president involves much more than symbolism, but ignoring the symbolic aspect can bring down the whole enterprise. Just ask Bush II. Flying high over New Orleans after Katrina, instead of doing something, became a symbol for a president out of touch, unconcerned and uninvolved when Americans were dying. (Likewise, his strutting on the aircraft carrier, but that’s another story.)
Obama is in deep trouble and digging deeper with talk of working things out and compromise with the Republicans who have vowed, in public statements, to do everything possible to see that he is a one term president. Going to Hawaii sounds like a grand idea. I’d like to do it myself, in fact. For a full time, 24/7 president, it is too much risk.
Doug Terry, 12.2.10
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