Obama’s vacation actually not a controversy

Shane Wade
Opinion Editor

If Republicans are so intent on being obstructionist to anything the president does, why do they care that he’s taking a short vacation at Martha’s Vineyard? Because he’s their mortal enemy, of course. While I’m not a particularly strong supporter of President Obama, I find any and all criticism of his decision to go on a short vacation to be artificial and nonsensical.

The truth behind this manufactured controversy isn’t centered around comparing and contrasting how many vacation days past presidents have taken (Bush: 1,020 in eight years; Clinton: 152 in eight years; H.W. Bush: 335 in four years) or whether any president has a right to time off; it’s about a systemic and ongoing attempt by the president’s opponents to discredit him by any means necessary, even at the cost of being seen as hypocrites themselves.

And to that end, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney offered up his own criticism of President Obama’s 10-day vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, just as Gov. Romney heads to Martha’s Vineyard to fundraise instead of sitting in his campaign bus pondering ways to fix the economy.

While the standing of the country obviously comes first, if the stock market plummets while the president is taking his daughters bike riding in Massachusetts, there is nothing he could do to mitigate that event. Presidents don’t have the power of the purse or the right to tell people what to do with their money or stocks. In fact, if you believe in free market capitalism, like so many of the conservatives that attacked Obama for going on vacation, then you’d believe that the president should not interfere with the markets.

Furthermore, any fan of Freakonomics Radio would tell you that notable economists, including Justin Wolfers of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and The Brookings Institution, believe that the president of the United States has little influence on the economy; any influence he may have is only perceived influence by people that actually do have influence on the matters like the stock market.

After Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot and many others were killed by Jared Loughner in Tucson, Ariz., President Obama, among others, called for a return to civility in politics. And they got it; for the first time in many years, Congress performed a greatly symbolic act and did not sit according to political party at the State of the Union speech.

The greatest act that Congress could do to bring civility back to politics was make Sen. Joe Lieberman feel awkward about where he should sit. And as soon as the president’s speech ended, so did that civility. If that civility had continued to exist today, no one would be criticizing the president for taking a 10-day working vacation.

The criticism of President Obama for taking a short vacation while his do-nothing, obstruct-everything Congress is away from Washington, taking their own five-week vacation, was the last straw. I will no longer be remotely surprised by any attacks or attempts to discredit the President by conservatives, regardless of their ridiculousness, pettiness or hypocrisy.

After the debt ceiling agreement that solved very little, it is quite clear that the right-wing hopes for the president’s failures. And they’ll allow the rest of the country to suffer in order to achieve it.