Barack and Michelle Obama read to second graders yesterday. Photo credits: upi/newscom.
Today is my birthday and I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit it, but I just received a gift from Maureen Dowd. No kidding.
In today’s op-ed Maureen’s acidic style is exactly what’s needed to puncture President Barack Obama’s long over-inflated ego – especially the part that sincerely believed that solely by virtue of his charming personality he could overcome all of the divisions in the national body politic and then go forth and save the rest of the world.
It had to be disconcerting for Obama to wake up yesterday morning to realize that Hillary Clinton so far might be his only cabinet appointee who has paid her taxes - and she was the one his team vetted most rigorously.
But let’s turn to Modo here. She writes:
On 9/11, President Bush learned of disaster while reading “The Pet Goat” to grade-school kids. On Tuesday, President Obama escaped from disaster by reading “The Moon Over Star” to grade-school kids.
“We were just tired of being in the White House,” the two-week-old president, with Michelle at his side, explained to students at a public charter school near the White House.
Even as he told the children his favorite superheroes were Batman and Spider-Man, his own dream of being the superhero who swoops in to swiftly save America was going SPLAT!
It just ain’t that easy.
Unlike W. and Dick Cheney, who heroically resisted acknowledging their historically boneheaded mistakes, President Obama summoned a conga line of Anderson, Katie, Brian, Chris and Charlie to the Oval Office to do penance, over and over.
“I think I messed up. I screwed up,” he confessed to Couric.
He told the anchors that the man who helped make him president, Tom Daschle, had made “a serious mistake” by not paying taxes on a car and driver. (It should have been a harbinger of doom when Daschle began sporting those determined-to-be-hip round red glasses.)
Mr. Obama admitted that “ultimately it’s important for this administration to send a message that there aren’t two sets of rules. You know, one for prominent people and one for ordinary folks who have to pay their taxes.”
It took Daschle’s resignation to shake the president out of his arrogant attitude that his charmed circle doesn’t have to abide by the lofty standards he lectured the rest of us about for two years.
Amen.
