Obama parties on TV while U.S. economy burns

WASHINGTON, March 23 (UPI) -- U.S. President Barack Obama has been in office less than two months, yet Steve Kroft of CBS said he's already got a "punch drunk" problem of incurable lightness of being.

Obama appeared on CBS' prime time news show "60 Minutes" for more than half an hour Sunday evening. Most of the interview offered little new material, other than shots of the new White House swing set. But at one point Kroft asked Obama if he was "punch drunk" because the president, in Kroft's estimation, was laughing and making jokes about the economic situation -- which is certainly no laughing matter.

Obama won the presidential election Nov. 4 over Republican candidate Sen. John McCain for one reason above all -- because the American people were disgusted by the way President George W. Bush had blown it on the economy. McCain proved little more than illiterate on the subject.

Yet since Obama took office, the U.S. economy has tanked far faster than it did under Bush. In the first six weeks of Obama's incumbency, the Dow Jones industrial average lost more than 20 percent of its value. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao softly announced a couple of weeks ago that his government, which holds nearly $700 billion in U.S. treasury bonds, was concerned about the wisdom of Obama's policies.

Over the past week the combination of alarming economic news and lighter-than-air presidential showbiz appearances and gaffes has multiplied.

Last Thursday the U.S. government announced a colossal $1.2 trillion bailout plan to rescue America's banks. That same evening Obama appeared with Jay Leno on NBC's "The Tonight Show." The first sitting president ever to appear on the show made an unintentionally insulting gaffe, laughingly comparing his poor bowling skills to those of the physically disadvantaged competitors of the Special Olympics.

The day before, on March 18, the president took part in the NCAA picks on ESPN. No sitting president has ever done that before either.

Plenty of sitting U.S. presidents over the past quarter-century have reveled in showbiz glitz -- including Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. But they have usually done so when the times have been good. Obama now gives the impression he is partying like Bill Clinton. But Clinton presided over a booming economy, and he was the only president in the past half-century to run the federal government with a budget surplus for his last two years in office. Under Obama, the economic condition is becoming more terrifying by the day.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who inherited the worst economic crisis in American history and eventually led the nation out of it, was famous for his joyous good cheer and infectious love of life. But his national media appearances, though many, were never trivial.

FDR's legendary fireside chats were all serious lectures to and engagements with the American people to discuss the nature of the many problems facing the country and explain why the president was taking the actions he regarded as appropriate to solve them.

Obama's rapidly developing "unbearable lightness of being" problem is also reflected in his unblinking support for his gaffe-prone Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Even before taking office, Geithner badly embarrassed the president with the revelation that he was a tax evader, if not a cheat. Only last week he unleashed a firestorm of criticism with the news that he and his Treasury Department either had not known -- or had known and not cared -- that the destitute American International Group, after being bailed out with $170 billion of public funds, was paying top executives in its financial products division $160 million in bonuses.

However, Sunday on "60 Minutes," Obama told Kroft he would refuse to accept a resignation letter from Geithner were he to submit one, and the president said he continued to have full confidence in his treasury secretary. This was supposed to play as a strong, confident president riding high above the fray and shrugging off the politically motivated attacks of the Republicans in opposition.

Instead, it sounded just like President George W. Bush's famous -- and ruinous -- praise for Michael D. Brown, the worst head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in its history, after Brown had totally bungled relief operations for the drowned city of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005.

On that occasion, Bush notoriously said, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." But the hapless Brown was only responsible for failing to rescue a single drowning American city from a flood crisis. Geithner is wrestling, so far ineffectually, with a crisis that has already thrown millions of Americans out of work and that threatens ruin for the entire nation of 300 million if it is not resolved successfully.

This is a make-or-break week for Geithner with his unveiling of the $1.2 trillion plan to buy up bad debts from banks so the institutions can get them off their books. The theory is that this will help banks become looser with the credit purse strings. The plan would establish the Public-Private Investment Program that would buy about $1 trillion of bad debts.

However, as one analyst told The New York Times, markets often like Geithner's plans before they're announced, but once investors see the details, they aren't impressed and another swoon occurs. If this gigantic project meets the same fate, the calls for Obama to fire Geithner will revive with redoubled force, and all the ESPN and "Tonight Show" appearances in the world won't deflect them.