The longest term

I know we can only have one president at a time, but it would be nice to have at least one in office right now.

As you undoubtedly know, President George W. Bush has about a month left before his lease on the White House is up and he has to get out.

Barack Obama is hurriedly packing up and choosing his staff so that as soon as he’s able, he can start fixing the nearly countless crises the country is currently experiencing. But at the present time, the executive branch is caught in kind of a quandary.

The problem is this: Obama will not be inaugurated until Jan. 20, and because of that, he’s not actually the president yet. Because of this, he can’t do anything that the president would typically do, like making policy or running the country.

The only real power that he has right now is the power of the bully pulpit – he’s going to be president soon, so people are tending to listen to what he has to say. But he has no official, constitutionally sanctioned power.

This is why we’re lucky that in the American political system: There’s a period of time set aside to transition from one administration to the next, so that while the incoming president still lacks power, there isn’t a total vacuum. In times of crisis, this design keeps the country from completely collapsing while power changes hands.

Of course, for this to work, the sitting president has to actually make some kind of effort to do ... well, anything at all.

While Obama has been holding a press conference a day and rolling out his administration’s leaders with the haste befitting the conditions we’re living in and the aptitude befitting the immaculate campaign he ran, the current president has done little to nothing to help keep the country from falling apart around him.

Here’s an example: The day before Thanksgiving, Obama held a press conference to introduce his Economic Recovery Advisory board, which will be tasked with figuring out how to drag our economy out of the pit of excrement that it’s been driven into. That same day, President Bush pardoned a turkey. Now, that in and of itself isn’t to be criticized; it’s a White House tradition, and, though dumb and hokey, it isn’t Bush’s fault. However, it is his fault that the pardoning was the only item on his agenda that day.

And the worst part is that Democrats don’t think Obama is doing enough. People like Chris Dodd and Barney Frank have called on him to “step up.” At this point, to me it looks like he’s doing about all he can, aside from staging some sort of coup. The past eight years have seen enough constitutional violations – I think it would be a bad idea for Obama to start off with some of his own.

Obama has said again and again since being elected, as he’s been invited to international conferences and the like, that the United States has only one president at a time. He’s right: and at this point, it’s him.