Problems?

By and large, I think President Obama is doing and has done some terrific things, for sure, since gaining office this year.

Doing away with Guantanamo is an improvement for the country--re-establishing a nonpolitical Justice Department is huge, nominating Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court recently, the list goes on.

But there have been, as there always are, missteps.

Hey, they're all humans there at the White House but these missteps have seemed rather avoidable.

The first, I think, was the goofy gift he gave to Britain's Queen early this year.

(WTF?)

But that was really a minor problem or issue and we can all laugh about it and recover.

Then there was this odd oversight of the President's and French President Nikola Sarkozy's and Britain's Prime Minister. I mean, why would you NOT invite the one person to the D-Day commemoration WHO WAS THERE? (That being the Queen).

That just didn't make sense.

Now, in the very rare, overly-sensitive, odd and forever war-torn place that is the Middle East, the President made a very smart speech to the Muslim world and the rest of us.

In it, he said many wise, true and possibly difficult things.

He called for fairness and "give and take" from all sides involved. He asked for concessions from both sides and a lot more.

All good.

But one thing President Obama didn't do on this trip to the Middle East was include a stopover in Israel. I think that's a glaring omission and I'd love to hear an official explanation for it. I'm not saying he HAD to go or needed to go or that it was a huge mistake, at all.

It might possibly be one, though, and I'd love to know the reason he didn't make this stop.

(Link to story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090604/ap_on_go_pr_wh/obama)

Where the President really hurts himself and his political party, though, is on spending, without doubt.

When now former President Bush proposed spending the trillions he said he wanted and needed to bail out the banks and support the economy, we all knew he was stupid and at the end of his Presidency.

For President Obama to continue this huge spending reflects especially badly on him and his Democratic Party because it makes it far too easy to paint him as the old cliche': "a tax-and-spend Liberal".

It's old but extremely effective and it makes a sort of "Achilles heel" for the President.

He needs to get away from this big, deficit spending, for the country's sake and his own.