President Obama left Friday for a nine-day trip to Hawaii, Australia and Indonesia. The president is trying to justify this long foreign excursion by saying that it will create American jobs.

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Those pressures to stay home are even stronger with the presidential election just one year off, but Bower says cutting this trip short would be a mistake. It would underlie a narrative that the Chinese have promoted in some sense that the Americans are interested in Asia, but they're not consistently engaged. What President Obama leaves behind is a congressional super committee that's crashing on a deadline to find more than $1 trillion in deficit reduction. In public, the members have appeared dysfunctional and gridlocked. Some people have urged President Obama to get more deeply involved in the negotiations, saying a hands-off approach shows a lack of leadership. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg spoke this week in Washington. The executive branch must do more than submit a plan to a committee and then step aside and hope the committee members take action. But the president has recently been washing his hands of Congress. In event after event, his motto has been... We're going to act on our own because we can't wait for Congress to help our families and our economy. So Mr. Obama is leaving the country, returning just three days before the congressional super committee's due date and instead of spending the next week wading through the partisan muck, he'll speak to an international audience where he's more popular and perhaps more influential.
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