Presidents have "feet of clay"

I'm not sure if anyone needs reminding, but all human leaders are flawed. The press seemed to be humored by President Bush's admittance of the same in his final press conference. Some may know this, but I was a Pastor for 16 years (1980-1996). Trust me I am flawed and I made plenty of mistakes. None of them rose to the level of disqualification from the Pastorate (1 Tim 3) but there were mistakes of omission and mistakes of commission! Shocking hugh! We vest too much confidence in who a man is and what a man can do!

Back to the political front: Obama will not pay your mortgage. He will not solve the energy crisis! Many Presidents have tried but he will not usher in peace in the Middle East. He will not stop the melt of glaciers or turn about global warming* (* Pseudo-science anyways!). And he will not turn the economy around! (I think economic cycles are a lot like the common cold. Want a cure for the cold: Eat, drink, sleep, and wait 7 days. Cure for our economy .... government step out of the way and in time the markets will correct themselves.

Back to Presidents. Peggy Noonan comments:

Mere Presidents: American leaders are mortal, not magical

Excerpt:

The Founders, who were awed by the presidency and who made it a point, the early ones, to speak in their inaugural addresses of how unworthy they felt, would be astonished and confounded by the over-awe with which we view presidents now. We treat them as if they are the Grand Imperial Czar of the Peacock Throne, and we their 'umble servants. It's no good, and vaguely un-American. Right now patriotism requires more than the usual candor. It requires speaking truthfully and constructively to a president who is a man, and just a man. We hire them, we fire them, they come back for photo-ops. They're not magic.

Comment: Phrase "Feet of Clay" is from Daniel 2:31-33

More excerpts from Peggy:

Mr. Obama promised "dramatic action" and said that while the cost of his proposals will be "considerable," so will "the consequences of doing too little or nothing at all." He again promised a public works program. Much of it seemed designed to answer the question, "What would the WPA have looked like if FDR had been an environmentalist?" In its lack of price tags and specific size and scope of proposals, the plan seemed more a conversation starter, as they say, than a thrown gauntlet.

Toward all this I suspect Americans will maintain a stance of hopeful ambivalence. We are a center-right nation and at least formally oppose gusher-like spending. But once you've got a deficit of more than a trillion dollars, two trillion hardly seems worse. You're in the area of numbers so astronomical as to be unimaginable. It's like hearing Pluto is 50,000 light years away but Saturn is 48,000 light years away. They're both pretty far.

...

Soon after the speech, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reacted with caution. He was low key. He didn't attack. He said the current projected deficit of $1.2 trillion is "an eye-popping number," and said he liked the part of Mr. Obama's program that includes reducing tax rates for the middle class. "We intend to work with the new president . . . to try and get this right," he said. The Republicans in the Senate are like swimmers ten feet offshore. They're going to let the Obama wave roll over them, wait for the water level to even out, and then make a move. Who would believe them claiming to be the party of fiscal responsibility and smaller government now anyway? They need more time to pass between the high-spending Bush years and an eventual—and one hopes principled—opposition to Obamanomics.


....

... referring to the awe with which we view the presidency, the White House, and the famous office with no corners in which presidents so often feel cornered.

Here is an idea for everyone in Washington: Get over it. It's distorting the system. This week we saw the past four presidents standing in the Oval Office for a photo-op on the afternoon of their private lunch. As you looked at the pictures afterward you had to think: How flawed were they? How many were a success?

Did you notice how they all leaned away from Jimmy Carter, the official Cootieman of former presidents? It was like high-school students to the new girl: "You can't sit here, we're the Most Popular table."