The problem with Barack Obama playing the professor in chief

It is not the president's job to be a fair and balanced historian

President Obama sits in the Oval Office.
(Image credit: (CC BY: Official White House photo by Pete Souza))

President Obama's remarks last week at the National Prayer Breakfast were nothing new — and neither was the controversy they sparked.

From the time he first burst onto the national political stage, with his prime-time keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Obama has sought to situate himself above the fray. The candidate for the U.S. Senate from Illinois declared that the idea of separate "red" and "blue" regions of the country was a fiction. "There's not a liberal America and a conservative America," Obama famously proclaimed to an arena packed with partisan Democrats united in burning hatred for President George W. Bush. "There's the United States of America."

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Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.