Damned if He Spoke and …

Nev­er hav­ing been pres­id­ent, I can only guess that the day of the Kennedy Cen­ter Hon­ors ex­tra­vag­anza would be one of the most en­joy­able of the year. Not the part about dress­ing up in form­al wear, ne­ces­sar­ily. But spend­ing an af­ter­noon and even­ing hanging out with some of the most ac­com­plished people in mu­sic and the arts, some of them our her­oes, and listen­ing to per­form­ances in that won­der­ful ven­ue—that must be pretty cool. But one of the worst days to be pres­id­ent would be one in which ad­visers and sup­port­ers are press­ing you to say or do something to ad­dress an al­most im­possible situ­ation about which there really isn’t much you can say or do. There’s noth­ing new to tell the Amer­ic­an people that will re­as­sure them. There is no dra­mat­ic new policy to an­nounce, no new in­form­a­tion to con­vey. Noth­ing. Wel­come to Pres­id­ent Obama’s Sunday. He showed up late at the Kennedy Cen­ter be­cause he was busy ad­dress­ing the na­tion, al­though he had noth­ing new to say or do. To be sure, top mil­it­ary of­fi­cials are cer­tainly fine-tun­ing