Sunday’s CNN program State of the Union with John King devoted an entire segment to analyzing Obama’s “Special Olympics” quip. The sober-minded Thomas Friedman mentions it in his Sunday column too http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/opinion/22friedman.html.

I think the gaffe has now worked its course and will soon disappear. However, I agree with New York Times columnist Frank Rich http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/opinion/22rich.html?em that Obama is getting too far behind the ball when it comes to presidential rhetoric not matching public sentiment. Rich contends that the financial crisis is Obama’s Katrina, and he isn’t giving it serious attention. I concur.

In normal times, it would be comforting to see a president picking the winner of every March Madness college basketball bracket. But this year? I agree with Duke’s Coach K who said “stick to the economy.” I want a president who is working so hard that he hasn’t seen a sports page since inauguration day.

Cracking jokes on Leno? I still maintain it was fine for Obama to go on the Tonight Show, but he could have and should have stuck to delivering sobering news and policy prescriptions about the economy.

Obama’s cool cerebral approach served him well during the campaign, but when he describes Wall Street executives on the public dole who still took million dollar bonuses as merely “inappropriate,” as he did last week, he sounds like he’s annoyed at a minor faux pas, like using the wrong fork at a State Diner.
The Obama Administration must quickly come to grips with the fact that the largest financial fraud in the history of the world has recently taken place in the United States, and I’m not talking about Bernie Madoff. This has been follow-up up by the very same unindicted criminals getting middle class tax payers to bail them out with six, seven and eight-figure bonus orgies. The angry masses might not understand credit default swaps with precision, but they now understand the big picture perfectly.

Obama must get out front on this issue both rhetorically and substantively, or he runs the risk of ending up the same as the moderate reformers did in the French Revolution.