The Thinker Barack Obama explains his job.

[righteousmomma]

WSJ Online:

This whole wrap up of the week's political events is too good to miss but I could not resist posting the first part:
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By JAMES TARANTO

What exactly is the job of the president of the United States? Let's ask the man who currently holds that position, Barack Obama:

My job right now is just to make sure that everybody in the Gulf understands this is what I wake up to in the morning and this is what I go to bed at night thinking about: the spill.

Obama's job description is fascinating. He has been depicted as a proponent of "activist government," but this may be a bum rap. Now he tells us he thinks that if he somehow gets people to think about him and how much he's thinking about what he thinks they think he should be thinking about, his job is done.

Which raises only two questions: First, if the requirements of his job are so modest, why is he still having trouble meeting them? Second, couldn't all this cogitation be done at a cost of less than $3.5 trillion a year?

Are we being too literal here? If we are, then so is the pro-Obama New York Times, whose coverage of the press conference at which the president made the above statement likewise emphasizes his thought processes. Here's how it begins:

President Obama uttered three words on Thursday that many of his 43 predecessors twisted themselves into knots trying with varying degrees of success to avoid: "I was wrong."

He strode into the East Room to mount a robust defense of his handling of the largest oil spill in American history, reassuring the nation that he was in charge and would do "whatever is necessary" to stop and clean up the BP leak in the Gulf of Mexico. But by the time he walked out an hour later, he had balanced that with a fairly unusual presidential self-critique.

He was wrong, he said, to assume that oil companies were prepared for the worst as he tried to expand offshore drilling. His team did not move with "sufficient urgency" to reform regulation of the industry. In dealing with BP, his administration "should have pushed them sooner" to provide images of the leak, and "it took too long for us" to measure the size of the spill.

Actually, that's not a self-critique at all, but classic passive-aggressive behavior: I'm sorry. I was wrong. I should never have trusted you.