Maureen Dowd's "Of Dystopias and Alphas": Obama Should Read Robert Frost

In her latest New York Times op-ed entitled "Of Dystopias and Alphas" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/opinion/dowd-of-dystopias-and-alphas.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss), Maureen Dowd again berates Obama for his detachment and ineptitude:

"Is Obama so isolated he can’t see that Americans are curled up in a ball, beaten down by a financial crisis, an identity crisis, a political crisis and a leadership crisis?

He got the job by blaming Washington. But once you’re in the White House, you are Washington. It’s like the plumber who came to fix the sink waiting for the sink to fix itself."

President Obama, however, thinks otherwise. In his August 20, 2011 weekly address (http://m.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/08/20/weekly-address-getting-america-back-work), prerecorded from Alpha, Illinois (heaven forbid that we should see him golfing in Martha's Vineyard), Obama seeks to distance himself from Washington:

"Now, I’m out here for one reason: I think Washington, DC can learn something from the folks in Atkinson and Peosta and Cannon Falls. I think our country would be a whole lot better off if our elected leaders showed the same kind of discipline and integrity and responsibility that most Americans demonstrate in their lives every day.

Because, the fact is, we’re going through a tough time right now. We’re coming through a terrible recession; a lot of folks are still looking for work. A lot of people are getting by with smaller paychecks or less money in the cash register. So we need folks in Washington – the people whose job it is to deal with the country’s problems, the people who you elected to serve – we need them to put aside their differences to get things done."

Encapsulated in these two paragraphs is Obama's 2012 reelection game plan: Blame Washington, not me. I may currently reside in the White House, but I'm separate and distinct from what happens in the nation's capital. Or as Bart Simpson might say, "I didn't do it."

Dowd recommends that Obama "pick up a volume of Robert Frost" and concludes her column with a quote from "The Lesson for Today:

"I’m liberal. You, you aristocrat,

Won’t know exactly what I mean by that.

I mean so altruistically moral

I never take my own side in a quarrel."

Personally, I would have the Proscratinator-in-Chief reread Frost's "The Road Not Taken":

"I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference."

Unlike Frost's traveler, Obama all too often gets stuck at the junctions, incapable of taking the reins and leading the nation forward via either alternative route.