Clobbered Comforter-in-Chief

When the eight years are over, Barack Obama may go down in history mostly for his grace as America’s designated mourner. This weekend it’s Oklahoma in the endless tour of body-count catastrophes natural and man-made.

As the President pursues ministerial duties, everyone else in Washington is consumed with efforts to defrock him for not preventing deaths at Benghazi or reining in bureaucratic scandals. Opponents have not yet found ways to tax him with hurricanes and tornadoes, but they must be trying to twist sequester results into White House blame.

In the larger sense, all this is a long wake for an America that almost was, where we used to bow our heads in prayer together after disasters with some awareness of common humanity in the face of a tenuous world and work to control our primitive impulses to destroy one another over ideological differences.

Among the many ironies swirling around the figure who started out to unite us all under the banner of “Yes We Can” is that he may end up delivering a eulogy for “No We Wouldn’t.”