Back on the Hustings

This man, Raymond Learsy, writing in the Huffington Post, has a point:

After the austere and imposing setting in which he delivered his State of the Union address the president thought nothing of undoing that "Presidential" moment by traveling the very next day for a badly focused, undisciplined town hall meeting in Tampa where he laid himself bare to a cheering partisan crowd, repeating much of what he said the night before in fractured terms, hailing the advent of bullet trains and stumbling through a free for all question and answer period. It was embarrassing and in terms of the cost to perception of his office, particularly damaging.

This nation at this time is at as dangerous a crossroads as it was at the beginning of the Second World War, economically, politically and at mortal risk of attack to our interests abroad and to the homeland. Our foreign policy is a shambles, our economic policy barely a step behind, our sense of self and who and what we are, at its lowest ebb since the 1930's.

What is desperately needed is leadership and the nurturing of those trappings of tradition that have seen us through difficult times before. We don't need a president who wants to hang out with us, we need a president who understands the enormous symbolic power of his office and uses it to rally us to do all that we need to climb out of our current abyss.

I'm sorry that Obama has low ratings right now, but it does seem rather pathetic to be trying to go back into campaign mode, to try and restore 'the magic', as if that's the problem.  It's not.