UPDATED Still two weeks to go...

...and Obama is already being criticized for his leadership. By his own party.

UPDATE 12/8/08 - Two weeks? What am I, stoned? More like two months...less, actually, but closer to that than what I wrote. What the hell was I thinking? -BV

Well, that didn’t take long.

Barack Obama isn’t President yet, and now there are elements within his own party who are criticizing him for not acting enough like a President. Obama is famous for saying that we only have one President at a time; more recently, Congressman Barney Frank has said that this estimate overstates the number of Presidents we have.

Witty banter aside, Obama is right...we only have one President, and his name (for a couple of weeks yet, anyway) is George W. Bush. If Bush chooses not to do anything Presidential and instead wants to work on rewriting history to make his reign smell better, that’s his call. He can ignore his responsibilities if he wants to; for two more weeks, it’s his job to screw up.

I’m not sure what those Democrats want from Obama, anyway. He’s performed a miracle getting elected President of the United States, where it was once thought (last year, in fact) that a black man had no chance of getting elected President in modern America. That was no mean feat; but for some reason one miricle is not enough for some people.

More to the point, there’s nothing Obama can do right now besides assembling his cabinet, reading the intelligence briefings and studying the economy in preparation for the job he’s about to take. And these things he’s doing, and doing as well as anyone may; I fail to understand what rabbits people expect him to pull out of his hat now, before he even has the job, before he has any power to actually make things happen.

Some people seem to be forgetting that the president-elect does not have any power, executive or otherwise, before he’s the President, save for the aforementioned appointing of his staff and advisors. Sure, he can say what he’s going to do, he can prepare to start right in on day one and make pronouncements and laws and Executive Orders and the like, but before he's actually got the job he is powerless. And he’s not President yet, and until he is he can’t actually do shit.

Personally, I like how Obama has handled himself to this point. I like his proposed public works program (I keep wanting to call it the WPA) and I like that he appears to be trying to save the auto industry, without simply handing them cash with no oversight and without strings. But the economic situation is changing daily, too fast for most of us to keep up, and it’s by no means the only disaster that the new President will have to deal with. Expecting Obama to do something now that would make it all better would be like insisting on smoked salmon and Melba toast instead of loaves and fishes.

Let the man do his job; and right now, two weeks before his inauguration, his job is to prepare to be President, to see to it that we actually have a President informed and prepared to do the job as of that day; Like Barney Frank, I’m not entirely sure we have one now.

I do know that we get one in a couple of weeks; let’s not expect the man to be doing the job before he has any legal authority to actually do the job.

The Blues Viking

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.