Laugher in Chief?

I was watching "60 Minutes" last night and I was struck by how much laughing the President did during the course of the interview.  This raises the obvious question: "why laugh at all?"

A column the morning highlights the distinction between "jokes over beer" laughter and "reassuring laughter," assuring that Obama's laughter was the later sort. The purpose of the laughter was to communicate confidence in what he is doing, the columnist suggests.

I would have no problem with this theory if President Obama acted like he had real answers to the many problems facing our nation.  In that hypothetical, his laughter might be reassuring. However, last night he was (surprisingly) ineloquent when it came to the economy:

Kroft asked far more sensitively, are you "punch drunk"?  I would have asked the following:

Seriously? You've spent $16.4 billion bailing out a company (GM) that almost no one but the UAW wants to bail out. You've proposed a Federal budget twice as large as your predecessor ($3.7  trillion).  It's projected that the Federal deficit will balloon by $11 trillion over the next 10 years because of your recent decisions.  Finally, under the watch of your administration, tax payer money was spent on million dollar bonuses.  (Proving that the Federal government can't manage one financial firm, let alone an entire industry). Now, your laughing? Really?

President Obama's response was merely to say: "you have to have gallows humor".  I can only imagine the uproar of the populous if former President Bush laughed about the mess in Iraq and, when questioned about it, said "well, you have to have gallows humor".  I am fully aware that spending several trillion dollars in the course of two months, while possibly dooming our financial future, and bogging us down in a war for six years are different matters, but in the very least they are both serious issues that demand a President's respect and attention.  Certainly, they don't suggest that gallows humor is appropriate.

While some may see laughter as a "reassuring sign" or as "confidence" amidst the tough decisions that need to be made, I see it as something completely different.  

President Obama is nervous.

He doesn't have a plan.  There is no rudder to the salvage ship that is trying to bailout the US economy.  His plans are a jumble of counter-incentives that will flood the gates in the short term but will not heal our economy for the long term. In short, he has no confidence in what he's doing because he really doesn't know what he's doing.

In politics, when you don't know what you're doing you have to project that confidence, you have to laugh it off.  How I wish we had a President who actually knew what he was doing, who didn't have to project confidence with a nervous laugh.