What Becomes of the Brokenhearted

It's Music Monday, conveniently enough, but that's not the reason the old Jimmy Ruffins tune came to mind.   I was trying to shake off a funk that gets renewed with regularity, caused by disappointment in the President.  I wasn't even one of the Obamamaniacs, yet still his passivity is heart rending. 

What becomes of the broken hearted
Who had love that's now departed?
I know I've got to find
Some kind of peace of mind--

Maybe.

Seems I'm not the only one moving from perplexed to pissed by the President's persistent lack of leadership. Whatever the whys and wherefores, one thing that is patently clear is this (as Frank Rich said in "All the President's Captors" in Sunday's New York Times):

A chief executive who repeatedly presents himself as a conciliator, forever searching for the “good side” of all adversaries and convening summits, in the end comes across as weightless, if not AWOL.

That's where we are, folks.  The President seems to be more intent on being liked than being a leader.  Any chance there seemed to be of mitigating the effects of Bush's chicanery have been squandered, and former supporters have given up hoping against hope and are exiting stage left--even Paul Krugman:

It’s hard to escape the impression that Republicans have taken Mr. Obama’s measure — that they’re calling his bluff in the belief that he can be counted on to fold. And it’s also hard to escape the impression that they’re right.

and Robert Kuttner:

Let's stop pretending. Barack Obama is a disaster as a crisis president. He has taken an economic collapse that was the result of Republican ideology and Republican policies, and made it the Democrats' fault. And the more that he is pummeled, the more he bends over.

From the blogosphere, in Fool Me Once at  A Black Man's View and Time to Think the Unthinkable: A Democratic Primary Challenge to Obama's Reelection at Huffington Post, black bloggers are already thinking of alternative choices for President in 2012--and they're hardly alone.

So this is what becomes of the brokenhearted.  We keep hope alive, we ponder, rationalize, we mourn, we get pissed, then move on. 

Still, it's hard for me to believe that this is *really* who this dude is.  Really?   I'm thinking the unthinkable (though obvious to some): perhaps, given the unprecedented position that he holds, he is getting some unprecedented threats.  Maybe he's letting all else go to hell in a handbasket in order to save his family's lives.  Maybe he's been threatened, more than once, and maybe repeatedly, by people we all "know".  Think about it.  The extent to which people--even the media-- feel comfortable disregarding the vaunted "Office of the President" and disrespecting him publicly (think last year's State of the Union Address, any 60 Minutes interview by Steve Kroft), can you imagine what is said to him when there ARE no cameras or mics around?

In between your sobs, pray for him.