Should Obama Be Allowed A (Deluxe) Holiday?

This question has been asked again, as it is every time the Obama family allows itself a few days off. Barack Obama intends to being a ten-day vacation on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts this Thursday. That alone has caused controversy.

“[I]f you’re president of the United States, and the nation is in crisis, and we’re in a jobs crisis right now, then you shouldn’t be out vacationing,” scolded Mitt Romney, one of the favorites in the Republican Party race for the next presidential election. “Instead, you should be focusing on getting the economy going again.” Newt Gingrich, another contender for the Republican nomination, stated that Obama “ought to cancel the vacation — period.”

The Republican party has even launched a postcard campaign to remind Barack Obama that his place is at the U.S. economy’s bedside, not on golf courses in Martha’s Vineyard. In a statement urging its supporters to drown the president’s vacation in a flood of mocking postcards, the Grand Old Party attacked: “This is the same president that said he ‘will not rest until anybody who’s looking for a job can find one,’ yet he’s jetting off to the Vineyard to play golf and relax on the beach.”

The detail that makes people particularly angry is that the Obama’s have rented a villa of very high standing — the rental price is estimated between $35,000 and $50,000 a week — on an island where only the most upper-crust elite in the country can be found. They also did this during the two previous summers. It is even grating on left-wingers: “Martha’s Vineyard is the last place on earth that the president of the United States should find himself next week,” wrote Colbert I. King, an opinion writer at the Washington Post: “This is no time for the president to dwell in splendid seclusion among the rich and famous.”

Among the Democrat supporters who were applauding the president during the past three days on his tour of the Midwest, many of them make excuses for this escapade. “He works hard, he does have the right to a holiday like all Americans who work hard,” said Rowlend Carolyn, 49, an analyst for a leading manufacturer of agricultural machinery, interviewed Wednesday in Alpha, Illinois. “All the same, we can not expect him to work 365 days a year.” And the choice of Martha’s Vineyard? “He is still our president. He is not an ordinary person, it is normal for him to be entitled to certain perks.”

In the event that Obama’s advisers have lost all sense of reality, Politico has proposed five alternatives to Martha’s Vineyard, where Barack Obama would have also been able to relax and even play golf while staying in touch with some more ordinary Americans. Our favorite has to be Sheboygan, Wisconsin, the self-proclaimed Bratwurst Capital of the World. It is certainly too late for this year, but you can bet that the advisors will think this through next summer, when the question of the Obama family vacation is asked just a few months before the presidential election.