Mr President, did you bend or did you bow?

Whispers of disillusionment with Barack Obama among left-wing pundits are growing louder each day. Their disillusionment stems primarily from the fact that he is proving to be far more pragmatic than ideological as president.

For example, these pundits – who take credit for getting him elected – lament that Obama has failed to appoint a fresh and diverse a Cabinet as promised (too many Clinton administration has beens and too many white businessmen); has failed to make his government initiatives transparent as promised (not a single bill has been published in advance for public scrutiny); and has failed to discontinue many of the war-on-terror tactics Bush championed as promised (the US is still renditioning and torturing suspects despite his protestations to the contrary) – just to name a few.

But I find their whining in this respect naive and partisan. In fact, on matters of substance, I give Obama’s presidency to date a strong B+.

Nobody remains a more ardent supporter of Obama than I.  Yet I’ve uttered a few whispers of disillusionment of my own. But they have been entirely about matters of style. For example, I lamented his invitation to Scarlet O’Hara wannabes to march in his Inaugural parade; his tendency to lull about official gatherings, shaking hands as if he’s still on the campaign trail; and his gratuitous dissing of British PM Gordon Brown during his recent visit to the White House.

And it is in this context that I feel constrained to comment on the kerfuffle now brewing about the way Obama greeted Saudi King Abdullah at last week’s the G-20 summit in London.

His critics charge that Obama displayed a “shocking display of fealty to a foreign potentate” by bowing to Abdullah. But his press spokesman, Robert Gibbs, insisted yesterday that:

It wasn’t a bow … [the president] bent over and grasped his hands with both hands [as a gesture of respect], and he’s taller than King Abdullah.

As disappointed as I am with his critics for making their patently absurd charge, I am even more disillusioned with Obama’s handlers for putting this Clintonian spin on such an egregious gaffe: He clearly bowed!

Besides, if this was nothing more than a gesture of respect, how do they explain Obama’s failure to do the same when he greeted the (even shorter) Queen? And do they not see how this inconsistency is such that it will only feed idle speculation about Obama’s affinity for, if not devotion to, Islam – as opposed to his professed Christian faith?

Meanwhile, I’m convinced that it would have endeared Obama at home and abroad even more if his handlers had simply chalked up giving Her Majesty only a slight tilt of the head while giving the king a full bend at the waist to an innocent commoner’s mistake.

And nothing reinforces his enviable common touch quite like the way he shook hands with the guard outside No.10 Downing Street – much to the discreet delight of the guard and obvious consternation of PM Gordon Brown.

Incidentally, it was a mistake because, no matter the royal protocol of the monarch, the founding principles of the United States make it anathema for any president to bow down before him or her.  This is why, for example, no US president has done anything more than give a respectful tilt of the head to the Japanese Emperor, for whom it would have been obviously “politically correct” to bow even lower than Obama did before the Saudi king.

Therefore, it is troubling that, instead of figuring this out, the geniuses in the White House decided to deal with the gaffe by making Obama seem as congenitally averse to admitting a mistake as George W. Bush. Never mind what it portends for his presidency that his advisers are so inclined not only to buy into this lie but also to disseminate it unabashedly.

Ultimately though, one has to wonder why Obama is allowing them to undermine the credibility of his presidency in this way…? After all, he has to know that it’ only a matter of time before a member of the press corps poses the question: Mr President, did you bow or did you bend?

Of course the Catch-22 now is: if he concedes the obvious, he makes his handlers look like dissembling hacks; if he perpetuates this lie, he makes Bill Clinton look like a Boy Scout.

What a silly, amateurish mess….

NOTE: If you’d like to see a comparison video of these now infamous bows, click here.