Advice to Obama

from Hugh Fitzgerald:

Obama's First Presidential Visit

And this is what he, Obama, should and could do: he could get on a plane, while the household staff are still vacuuming in the White House and the Old Executive Office Building – not just on any plane, but that special plane, the airforceoney one -- and fly straight down to San Antonio, Texas. And there he should present the very first Presidential Medal of the Obama Administration to Jacques Barzun, aged 100. And then Barack Obama should fly back to Washington.

Read also by the same presidential adviser:

The Inaugural Poem That Should Have Been Read, But Wasn't

Obama had the chance to do things right, and set things straight, but he passed up that chance. He might have chosen, he should have chosen, a good writer, with a good poem. Anthony Hecht is dead, so there was no contest. That someone was 88-year-old Richard Wilbur, of Cummington, Massachusetts and Key West, Florida.

And I've found just the poem for Wilbur to have read. . .