When nation mourns, President Obama consoles

The morning after the explosion, the Texas sky turns gray and cold. Then the clouds open and pour rain down on the dead, the wounded and what's left of the smoldering town of West.

Even as the body count began in Texas, a memorial unfolded in Boston for those slain earlier in last week's bombing. And it is, after all, just a few short months after the horror of Newtown.

Of course, there will never be enough measured words from authorities, eloquence from politicians or tales of heroism to make up for all that was lost in all these places and others in recent years. But it is hard not to notice that the country has entered a second full decade of hair-trigger uncertainty.

It is equally hard not to notice that perhaps the Obama presidency will not be measured by his successes but by his solace — not the place in history a president wishes to occupy.

West, Texas, is a tiny town of fewer than 3,000 people; you can see the whole town, pretty much, from Interstate 35. Until this week it was modestly famous as a place for great kolaches and a festival that celebrated the town's Czech immigrant heritage. Indeed, there was no Czech pun the town could pass up. There is the Czech Stop and the motel, the Czech Inn.

But there was nothing funny about the devastation that visited Wednesday night in an explosion that measured 2.1 on the Richter scale in Amarillo — 400 miles away.

Sadly, this little corner of Texas has always had its share of April tragedies. Twenty years ago this week, the federal government's disastrous raid on the Branch Davidian compound ended in nearly 80 deaths in nearby Waco. A little farther south, in May 1997, the F5 Jarrell tornado literally wiped the subdivision of Double Creek Estates right off the map, taking with it 27 lives.

Everyone must endure hardship, and many must endure tragedy in life. And mass tragedy differs from private ones only in one sense: One is shared, and the other must be endured alone.

The president has already had to console so many places: Fort Hood, Tucson, Aurora, New Jersey, New York, Newtown, Boston. It is part of the symbolic duty of presidents, after all.

But he has precious few successes to show as president. One can blame the Republicans, the deficit or polarized politics, but the point stands. And worse, the country he helps govern continues to be wracked by uncertainty, not merely economic or political. In January, a Gallup poll found that most people believed both taxes and crime would rise, economic difficulty would increase and American power would fall.

Of course, most things in life are beyond our control. But in the public square, at least, fatalism should not creep into governing in an effort to stave off disaster and tragedy or recover from it.

And yet, this president may wind up known more for consoling and mourning than anything else. It wouldn't even be his fault. The country entered an era of tumult and uncertainty on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 — and well more than a decade later it has not climbed out of it. Millions remain out of work; millions have lost their homes.

Of course, one president's legacy does not stack up to the fates of hundreds or thousands or hundreds of millions. And George Will once wrote that we don't need a president to console us. It's true, in a sense. We are not infants. Yet presidents are judged in history almost as much by how they made a country feel about itself as what they accomplished.

And with so few precious accomplishments in Washington and so many dark occasions such as the ones that visited Newtown, Boston and now West, this president may best be remembered by how he led in these.

It is probably not the legacy he would have wanted.

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