No doubt the White House is busy coming up with action plans for getting the president back on track for reelection.  Hey, fellas, how about an infrastructure bank?

The staffers are just doing their job, keeping up morale after the debt-ceiling defeat and the debt-rating defeat.  Not to mention that the improvement in unemployment rate from 9.2 to 9.1 percent came from a drop in the labor force of 193,000 and a smaller drop of 83,000 in the employed in the BLS Household Survey.  In a robust recovery, the unemployment rate might right now be going up as discouraged workers swarm back into the labor force looking for jobs.  But not in the Summer of Recovery, Year Three.

Let's step back a bit, and think about the very nature of kingship, and what a king or president should do when his plans have come to naught and his people are still in peril.  The answer that comes down to us from the ancients is that the king must sacrifice himself and his political power for the good of the people.  That is what the myth of the dying god is all about.  The Sumerians had it; Dumuzi was the god that died to promote the seasonal cycle of growth and death.  The Egyptians had Osiris; Christians have the Son of God who died for the sins of the world.

The same applies to mortal men.  Lincoln died as a martyr; FDR died at the end of the war against Fascism.  The much-maligned George W. Bush understood this.  He knew, after 9/11, that he must sacrifice popularity and praise for the long war against Islamic terror.  And he did.

Our liberal friends have not tended to think of their progressive project in tragic terms, except for the death of the Kennedy brothers, but now is their chance.  Their Great Liberal Hope, the first black president, has been revealed as a failure.  So now there remains the honorable way out, the sacrifice that redeems America as the last best hope of mankind.  I am not proposing a revolver and a decanter of whisky in the library, but something higher and nobler.

In what way should the president sacrifice himself for the change we can believe in?  Should he repeal ObamaCare?  Should he save Medicare by ending the free lunch for seniors?  Should it be a grand bonfire of the tax deductions balanced against individual and corporate tax-rate cuts, as Stephen Moore recommends?

I think that President Obama's best opportunity for immortality is a "Nixon Goes to China" turn on race policy.  President Obama may go down in flames next year in the worst rout of a sitting president in living memory, but he can still draw the sting that has poisoned the US for the last 50 years.  He can end the injustice of liberal race politics.

It's not as if he'd be going against his campaign promises.  He rocketed to national fame with his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that summoned Americans together.  Remember?

The pundits, the pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them... We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

No doubt in 2008 Americans read all kinds of hope into the president's campaign for Hope and Change.  Many patriotic Americans hoped that a President Obama, first black president, would declare victory on race, end quotas, and put the race-hustlers out of business.

It is pretty clear, from the Beer Summit, and from the Justice Department's decision not to prosecute the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation, that the Obama administration stands for more of the same on race.  And now things are taking a really ugly turn as the black street thugs have got the message, most recently as black gangs victimized peaceful white fair-goers at the Wisconsin State Fair.

Perhaps the black racist thugs are like Falstaff, who thought he would clean up when his drinking buddy Prince Hal became king.  "Let us take any man's horses; the laws of England are at my commandment.  Blessed are they that have been my friends; and woe to my lord chief-justice!" said he.

Falstaff got a nasty shock when he got to London and bowed before the new King Henry V.  "I know you not, old man," said the former prince.  It was woe to Jack, not to my lord chief-justice.

President Obama could get a start on this project by firing Attorney General Eric Holder for his involvement in the ATF gun-running scandal.  Then he could send a strong message to the black thugs that think that the laws of the US are at their commandment.

You'd think he'd at least do something to avoid becoming the Worst President Ever.

Christopher Chantrill is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. See his usgovernmentspending.com and also usgovernmentdebt.us.  At americanmanifesto.org he is blogging and writing An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism.