When the movies depict what it's like to be President, there's always one detail they miss. Sure, they show a guy who's really busy and probably stressed out with a rich inner life that almost no one sees. That's totally me, but it's not the whole picture. If you want an idea of what it's like to be President of the United States, imagine that instead of waking up every morning to the same alarm clock, you woke up to some grim-sounding aid giving you bad news. The truth is that people don't have some teary-eyed sense of civic pride. Government isn't about creating opportunities for people to make their society better, it's just a maintenance job for all the crap that goes wrong over the course of a year. When people are happy they keep to themselves. It's only when things start to fall apart that they come crying to the big G. That's why we have taxes. Fixing problems is expensive. So, yeah, I just keep on getting bad news. Sometimes I do right by it, sometimes I screw up. Nobody's perfect.

I'll cop to the offshore oil thing. Sometimes I feel like the powers that be like smack me down with irony just because they can. I put some support behind offshore drilling and not a month later one of the wells turns into an ecological nightmare. I've got to stop making big decisions before lunch. An empty stomach makes me stupid. When the aid called me about that one I could feel a familiar sensation of nausea. You know the kind, the one that comes up from the deepest part of your guts when you know you've screwed up bigtime and there are absolutely no excuses. It's times like that I wish I didn't have this job.

Of course, nobody pays attention when I do good. Where's the coverage of my crackerjack job in Tennessee? Yeah, I know the old routine like some kind of depressing vaudeville act. When a grade-A dunce like Dubyuh lets New Orleans drown it's an example of how incompetent and careless he is, but when Obama sends a respectable amount of aid to flooded Tennessee in a timely fashion it's just business as usual. I dunno, I suppose I should feel good about how people expect me to do the right thing, but a little pat on the back sure would help.

I've ragged on Bush a lot for his "history will decide" spiel, but I'm starting to see it from his point of view. Don't get me wrong, the guy's still going down in the record books as the worst President our country has ever seen, but he was right that the needy, hyper-critical mass opinion of the here-and-now is a crappy barometer of accomplishment. Maybe history will see me as a good, or at least a decent Head of State. It's just that right now everyone's on my case for every little thing that happens. But I can't wallow for too long. Surely any minute now some aid will call me with the most recent disaster.