President Obama forgot something during his first prime-time press conference last night:  hope.  His remarks were a stark reminder of Mario Cuomo’s line that ‘you campaign in poetry (but) you govern in prose’: 

I took a trip to Elkhart, Indiana, today. Elkhart is a place that has lost jobs faster than anywhere else in America. In one year, the unemployment rate went from 4.7 percent to 15.3 percent. Companies that have sustained this community for years are shedding jobs at an alarming speed, and the people who've lost them have no idea what to do or who to turn to.

They can't pay their bills. They've stopped spending money. And because they've stopped spending money, more businesses have been forced to lay off more workers. In fact, local TV stations have started running public service announcements to tell people where to find food banks, even as the food banks don't have enough to meet the demand.

As we speak, similar scenes are playing out in cities and towns across America.

Gone is the uplifting rhetoric of the campaign.  President Obama is giving us a cold dose of reality.   Will we be able to accept it?  President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave Americans good cheer and large measures of hope during the Depression.  President John F. Kennedy gave us wit and style when we were scared to death about nuclear Armageddon in the early 60s.  And President Reagan gave us his sunny optimism during the stagflation of the early 80s. 

President Obama needs to remember that we elected him to be honest with us, yes, but also to take us in a new direction, to eschew the politics of fear that have dominated the last 8 years, and to bring us hope. 

We know the situation is dire.  We don’t need caveats like this one: 

. . .The plan's not perfect. No plan is. I can't tell you for sure that everything in this plan will work exactly as we hoped, but I can tell you with complete confidence that a failure to act will only deepen this crisis, as well as the pain felt by millions of Americans.

That’s misplaced confidence.  We need a sense from our president as to how the crisis will end, not how it could get worse.  We like our reality in an admixture with a smile. 

What was extraordinary about President Obama’s first press conference was how easily he wore the mantle of president, a mantle that the previous holder of the office never put on comfortably in 8 years.  Obama is every inch a world leader.  Already! 

But he also needs to remember that the great presidents find hope even in the darkest times, and point the way forward for a nation that looks to them for leadership: 

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

President Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address was delivered at the lowest point in our nation's history.  And yet it showed the way forward with grace and wisdom.  That's what we look for in a leader when things are bleak.