Good Advice

Bob Herbert's column in the New York Times has some good advice for Barack Obama.

"If I were a close adviser of President Obama's," Herbert writes, "I would say to him, 'Mr. President, you have two urgent and overwhelming tasks in front of you: to put Americans trapped in this terrible employment crisis back to work and to put the brakes on your potentially disastrous plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan.' "

I can only hope he reads it — either on his own or upon the recommendation from one of his actual advisers.

"I would tell the president that the feeling is widespread that his administration went too far with its bailouts of the financial industry, sending not just a badly needed lifeline but also unwarranted windfalls to the miscreants who nearly wrecked the entire economy," Herbert writes. "The government got very little in return. The perception now is that Wall Street is doing just fine while working people, whose taxes financed the bailouts, are walking the plank to economic oblivion."

Herbert touches on the administration's insistence on emphasizing health care reform while unemployment has been virtually ignored. "We have spent the better part of a year locked in a tedious and unenlightening debate over health care while the jobless rate has steadily surged," he writes. "It's now at 10.2 percent. Families struggling with job losses, home foreclosures and personal bankruptcies are falling out of the middle class like fruit through the bottom of a rotten basket."

I do not recall health care reform being a part of the general election debate last year, but you couldn't prove it by the way it has been pushed to the top of the administration's first–year agenda.

The president's priorities are misplaced. That is Herbert's message. It has been mine, too.

I can only hope he gets it. Before it's too late.