Stop Levitating, Start Governing: Kristol

One of William Kristol’s favorite highlights of the new stimulus is the $8 billion reserved for a high-speed levitating train connecting Disneyland and Las Vegas. It wasn’t in the House bill and got just $2 billion in the Senate’s version, so they “compromised” on $8 billion. And where was Obama amid this grand compromise? “He’s not amid it,” Kristol writes in the Weekly Standard. “He seems to be magnetically levitating” above it.

Indeed, Obama seems to be the “missing player” of his administration. He let Congress write the stimulus, let Geithner go ahead with his disastrous financial rescue non-announcement, let Richard Holbrooke and Jim Jones cast him as a foreign-policy outsider, and let Joe Biden send mixed signals on Afghanistan. These missteps should cheer Republicans. “But not much. The country needs a president capable of exercising leadership.”
(More William Kristol stories.)