I miss having a president

With the white supremacist attack in Charlottesville earlier this week, the bomb detonated at a Minnesota mosque on August 5th, and the constant threats by North Korea, I find that I am wishing that we had a president.  It's not that I miss President Hillary Clinton or President Barack Obama (well I do, but that's not what I mean), I just mean a president, a leader of the country.

As "my" Daily 202 in the Washington Post (a wonderful daily email that gives you snippets of everything that is happening in the news and good analysis) pointed out today, this is really the first time in modern American history that the president of the United States has abdicated his role as moral leader, as re-assurer in chief, as, well, a leader of the whole country.  Link to Daily 202: Trump Acts like the President of the Red States of America.

It's cliché today to express nostalgia for President George W. Bush, but even he understood that he was president of us all, and struggled to provide context and reassurance.  This president not only had a horrific response to the events in Charlottesville, but he has completely failed to address the bomb in the Minnesota mosque, having one of his spokespeople say that he needs to see if it's real yet, while the Governor of Minnesota has meanwhile pronounced it a terrorist attack.  And that's to say nothing of his responses to North Korea.

It feels scary and lonely not to have a president, even one I disagree with, who understands his job.   For months I have been recommending against holding out hope for an impeachment and the installation of Mike Pence.  I have frankly feared a competent rightwing ideologue over an incompetent rightwing ideologue.    But there is part of me that is beginning to yearn for President Pence as a way, you know,  just to have a president.