HIS ROYAL CLERKSHIP

Sen. Joe Manchin, a freshman Democrat from West Virginia, thinks President Barack Obama is shirking his duty on the federal budget.

Why was the Senate voting on a budget plan, Mr. Manchin asked in a floor speech last week, "when the most powerful person in these negotiations — our president — has failed to lead this debate or offer a serious proposal for spending and cuts that he would be willing to fight for?"

Sen. Manchin is the only elected Democrat so far to go public with his frustrations, but according to The Hill newspaper, he has a lot of company.

"Frustrated Senate Democrats gave senior White House advisers an earful Thursday afternoon during a private meeting, telling them that President Obama needs to get more involved in the budget battle, according to Democrat sources," The Hill reported March 10.

"A Democratic aide said there was an ‘uproar’ on Tuesday during the weekly Democrat luncheon meeting, when lawmakers complained about the lack of the president’s public involvement in the debate over spending cuts."

Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass, and Joe Lieberman, an independent Democrat from Connecticut, expressed cautious criticism of President Obama’s inaction on the crisis in Libya.

"Showing reticence (to act) in a huge public way is not the best option," said Mr. Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"I wish (the president) had spoken out much more clearly and early against the Gadhafi regime," Sen. Lieberman said.

The editors of the Washington Post were less circumspect.

"It’s beginning to look as if what Mr. Obama has engineered is a situation in which the United States and its closest allies have declared that a dictator must go ‘as quickly as possible’ — and have not only constrained themselves from insuring that outcome but are actively hindering it by refusing to provide arms to the opposition," the Post said in an editorial March 9.

"Mr. Obama, who skipped a meeting of his top aides on Libya Wednesday, may hope that the Libyan rebels will defeat the Gadhafy forces without outside help," the Post said.  "If not, the world will watch as Mr. Gadhafy continues to massacre his people, while an American president who said that he must go fails to implement any strategy for making that happen."

Speaking about the president’s dithering on Libya, LtCol. Ralph Peters, a retired Army intelligence officer, said on Fox News last week: "Obama loves the idea of being president, but he can’t make a decision."

"In the case of Libya, Obama has seemed almost Shakespearean in his public musings about whether to be or not to be," agreed the military historian Victor Davis Hanson.

Barack Obama has become "an omnipresent fixture in American culture," said political scientist Jay Cost.  "In the last month alone, he appeared on TV on Super Bowl Sunday, doing an interview with Bill O’Reilly during the pregame program, and he even made a cameo in the Oscars.  Yet on policy substance, he’s been largely absent."

"Nobody in the United States is as intent on reminding his fellow citizens just how awesome he is than Barack Obama," Mr. Cost wrote in the Weekly Standard. 

"But that seems to be about it.  The sense of awe he has cultivated has not been used for any great purpose… This is more of a clerkship presidency, with a commander in chief either unwilling or unable to take the lead on the most challenging issues of the day."

After hearing what LtCol. Peters had to say, John Hinderaker, a lawyer who blogs at Power Line, mused: "Obama enjoys being president, and he especially treasures the symbolic significance of being the first African-American president."

 "That’s how his supporters feel, too.  I haven’t heard anyone defend his actual performance in a long time, but there is still widespread satisfaction with the symbolic value of his presidency.

"So why don’t we make him king?" Mr. Hinderaker asked.  "If being the first African-American president has symbolic value, just think what it would mean for the first King of the United States to be African-American!

"The king would have no duties beyond golf, so Obama would be perfect for the job. 

"Our king would need a place to live, of course.  So I’m thinking one of those big houses in Newport, Rhode Island would be ideal.  Safely out of the way.

"Then we could hold a special election and choose a real president."

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.