The President doesn't get to do whatever he wants. Correction: A good President doesn't get to do whatever he wants. That's something I've learned in the three years of my tenure, and from observing previous presidencies with more informed eyes. James Buchanan tried to do whatever he wanted, which just happened to be passing all the responsibility for national dialog to the Supreme Court because the growing divide between North and South scared him. That bought us the Civil War and we only survived as a nominally unified nation because Abraham Lincoln spent his presidency rarely, if ever, doing what he truly wanted. Herbert Hoover did whatever tickled his fancy, so he and his cronies ushered the nation into the Great Depression, forcing FDR to make scads of hard decisions just to keep America from devolving into a third world country. Richard Nixon did whatever pleased him, which included mass corruption and crippling what few checks we had against inflation just so he could continue with a pointless war. Poor Carter had to be the sacrificial lamb in that cleanup effort, fat lot of good it did. And now there's me. My presidency is in the wake of eight years of George W. Bush doing whatever the hell he wanted. Now I'm in the middle of cleaning up all those messes.

I, for example, would love to be able to go on television and just plainly say, "We're starting to call back the troops in Afghanistan. It's going to take a long time but we're doing it all the same. This war was stupid and it has so far cost this country 1 trillion dollars we're never getting back. That's why we're suffering as a nation today." Yeah, but I can't say that. I have to stand in that hall in the White House behind my podium and fill 15 minutes with flowery language about freedom and security and blah, blah, blah. Why? Because that's freaking politics. Pragmatism doesn't count for much when everything has to be constantly framed in grand, epic terms.

And ya know what? I wish I could bring every last troop home all at once. But if I do that, the whole region goes to shit. I create a vacuum that gets filled by the worst people and the whole world gets to see the gnarled wound. I may not have stuck that arrow into Afghanistan but I'll still get blamed for any damage it does when I pull it out. So, I'm pulling it out slowly and filling the gaps with crazy glue. It's the best we can hope for, but I can't really say that.

In New York I wanted to tell the LGBT activists that I'd like to wave my hands and let everybody get married. Aside from the civil rights issue of it, it'd be one less stupid thing we'd have to talk about with Republicans. I wish I could just pass down decrees, but it doesn't work that way. I have to give the responsibility to legislatures and courts, capricious as those entities can be. I've been cleaning up decades of legislative bigotry, but if I go too hard in one direction I piss off the wrong people and injustice is done purely as a reaction. I want to legalize same-sex marriage, but I also want another term in office to seal my administration's gains rather than see the next guy break them while they're still fresh and brittle. They say I'm not going far enough? Damn it, I'm going as far as I can without rolling out the welcome mat for a GOP bigot who openly supports putting anti-gay language right into the Constitution.

So, yeah, I don't get to do whatever I want. The last guy got to take his vacations during national tragedies and start pointless wars and push the economy into traffic. Me? I've got to tap dance and sound flimsy just to make things a little less horrible for everyone.