Why we need a President who's a little more OCD

The first image that comes to mind is Barack Obama, sitting in the Oval Office, agonizing about whether that picture on his desk of Michelle, Sasha, and Malia had been 'put back right' after David Axelrod, on his exit from the President's office, had bumped the little frame two inches to the left.

That's not quite what I mean. The TV series Monk has probably acquainted audiences in the United States the most accurately with the more humorous aspects of this sometimes debilitating disease, and the movie "The Aviator" ups the hilarity even more, showing what silly innocent quirkiness Leo can manage to get himself into!

But what actually I'm referring to is a concept of an 'Office of the President' who is 'OCD' about the larger house we all live in-- the Nation. On an evening pulling into a campaign stop in rural North Carolina for one of those down-home back-yard cook-out photo-ops, (like those hyphens? One of them doesn't belong...) an irritated Head of State is gritting his (or her!) teeth together after a bumpy ride down a crumbling state highway.  I can just imagine the President ordering his or her Chief of Staff to tabulate exactly how many rough roads there are in this country; breaking bridges, cracked concrete, disintegrating dams, atrophying airstrips-- to hell with partisanship and rhetoric. Everything needs to be 'put back right'.

We have an infrastructure in our Nation which often dates back to the 1940s or 50s- sometimes earlier. And while we often give our interstate highway systems a makeover, there really are plenty of roads out there that need fixing. Perhaps more important are our sewage and water delivery systems, leaking, breaking, and poisoning us while the political big-wigs discuss whether evolution should be taught in our schools. What if we don't have any schools, because they start, literally, falling down?

But yes, even the concept of a President that just gets the little stuff done because (s)he's too OCD to allow it any other way can be applied to other National problems, like weening the US off of oil imports. If the President felt that need, like an itch that couldn't be scratched, wouldn't it have been done by now? I mean, who really disagrees with this stuff? Isn't this the 'little' stuff that everyone thinks the Government should be doing? If the President, or dare I say, more members of Congress, felt more 'OCD' about the state of our Country, wouldn't they want to make sure it was 'put back right' the way it was? Not enough just to notice that the picture frame of this Country might be leaning a little right or left (oh yes, pun intended), but OCD enough to look into the details and question whether the nail holding up the picture frame was about to fall out? Shall we ask scarier questions like: what if our electricity grid is so old that one overloaded line in Ohio (or somewhere else on the grid) can cause a chain-reaction blackout for all of NYC ...and 30 million other people?


Disagree about the higher ideals of political rhetoric if you want, but you can't drive a car on a broken road, or without gas, you can't cook a dinner with contaminated water, you can't teach a child how to use a computer without a computer and maybe an internet connection, a bridge just might not hold the weight of that train for the 50th year in a row, and yes, you can't turn on the lights without a secure means of getting the electricity to you and your neighbors.

Ok, maybe the OCD thing was a bad analogy, or even one in bad taste, but the point I'm making here is that it's these kind of infrastructure things that the US needs to keep going for, well, the US to keep going. And recession or no, while we've been lucky on these issues so far (no catastrophic infrastructure failures), these issues will continue to affect all of us. So let's get some funding out to infrastructure projects, create some jobs, and make sure we avoid a problem that might really (slowly or suddenly) bring our 'way of life' to a frustrating, frightening, or screeching halt.

And let's seriously hope Monk doesn't become President. It would be funny for the first day, and then annoying after that when he insists that he won't sign any bill unless it has exactly 1,185 pages. And an average of 17.3 commas per paragraph.