Everyone deserves a vacation, even Obama

I am coming late to the debate over whether it is inappropriate for President Obama to continue his vacation despite the Christmas day terrorist incident. But the issue apparently still resonates, and the vigor of the White House counter-attack on critics shows that it remains hyper-sensitive to the charge (or “hyper-vigilant” as the reporter euphemistically put it).

Defenders of the administration complain that President Bush did not interrupt his vacation in December 2001 to offer comment on the “shoe bomber” so it is unfair to criticize the Obama administration for its initially laidback (“the system worked”) response. Critics of the administration complain that for years the Democrats made political sport out of juxtaposing images of President Bush on vacation with images of national security problems around the globe so it is time for some partisan chickens to come home to roost.

My own view is sympathetic to the administration (though not to the administration’s defenders). I find aspects of the Obama response troubling, but I don’t think the focus of criticism should be on how often the president plays golf, or on what is happening at the precise moment he is on the golf course, or on what he said right before or right after a golf shot. I understand the optics problem, as would any White House staffer, and Obama’s handlers probably can be faulted for some sketchy stage-craft. And I understand the desire of Republicans to finally dish out some of the guff they have taken for 8 years from blowhards. The towering hypocrisy of Bush critics who pretend that a vacationing Bush was a sign the president was fecklessly AWOL while a vacationing Obama is a sign the president is masterfully calm in a crisis would be breathtaking if it were not so depressingly predictable.

Let’s bash away at hypocritical pundits, but let’s not bash away at the White House — not for taking a vacation, anyway. The Obama team has struck me as tired and in acute need of a vacation for months now.  Being president is an exceptionally tiring job, and staffing the president is no day at the beach either.  The pace of a normal White House is fatiguing in the extreme, and this team has prided itself in attempting to do more than any other White House attempted. Every seasoned Washington hand I know has made more or less the same observation: the Obama team has tried to do too much and it is starting to show.

We should keep in focus the human element of being president (and there is good political science, much of it from my Duke colleague Ole Holsti, to help us keep that focus). A tired president , a stressed-out staff, a clogged in-box — this is all recipe for missteps.  The missteps may be relatively trivial: clumsy spin, shoddy stage-craft, or cranky outbursts.  Or they could be more significant: diplomatic gaffes, failure to connect intelligence dots, or other fundamental miscalculations.

We still do not have a clear enough picture into the back-story to the abortive Christmas Day attack to know precisely what went wrong, so it would be premature to suggest that fatigue was a factor.  But it is not premature to suggest that a tired White House is less capable of dealing effectively with the aftermath than a rested White House would be.

President Obama and his team need R&R more than anyone who has commented on their performance thus far, including me.  Unless there is credible evidence that they are shirking the national security portfolio while on vacation — and so far, I have not seen much evidence of that — I say let them play golf.