Why Is Our President Hanging Crepe?

All of us have heard quite a few discouraging words from our president in recent days. In spite of being elected on a wave of optimism, he seems bent on damping down our economic expectations. Why?

I first heard the term "hanging crepe" during my residency training in pediatrics back in the 60s. That was when all of us were trying to figure out how to best communicate with patients' relatives. The term was said to come from an old-fashioned way of letting the community know that a death had occurred in a home by putting black crepe over the door of the house, and by analogy, when dealing with medical problems, "hanging crepe" meant giving excessively pessimistic prognoses to your patients' relatives. This was a kind of protective strategy, I suppose, in that if the physician were correct, then he would be thought wise; and if he were wrong, then his actions would be thought brilliant, perhaps even heroic. Later this way of dealing with cases in which it was difficult to predict the outcome was subjected to searching ethical discussion, and other ways of handling these difficult cases were suggested.

I thought we had a problem with confidence which was supposed to be remedied by the injection of obscenely large amounts of money into failing businesses and the pockets of Friends of Obama (FOO). So then, why is President Obama trying to discourage us? Is this a lack of confidence in these methods of recovery? Is he trying to avoid the blame if they don't work? And of course, allow him to be elevated to "President-for-Life" if they do? Enquiring minds want to know.