As the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall approaches, President Obama has chosen not to attend. While I am amazed at this decision, I am angered by his empty reason, stating simply that he is “too busy.”

Too busy? This coming from a President who has time to fly to Copenhagen and personally pitch for the the Olympics? Too busy? This from a man who has endless time to wage war with factions of American media which he deems non-state-approved? This from a man who has played more golf in 10 months than President Bush played in two years?

The fall of the Berlin wall is unequivocally one of the most important events I’ve witnessed during my life, as it is many others. When President Reagan uttered those now famous words, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” words which almost didn’t make it into the final speech save for Mr. Reagan’s insistence, it marked not only a decisive moment for American liberationism, but an equal denial of Soviet Marxist encroachment that had darkened that corner of the world for so long. For a proud, assertive U.S. President to call out the Soviets in front of the eyes of the world, it was a moment forever embedded in the minds of many, a global scolding by Reagan to Gorbachev, not behind closed doors, but in the open air for the world to witness.

But President Obama is, unfortunately, too busy to attend the anniversary of this monumental day. I suspect that President Obama does have the time. I suspect he isn’t going because it would put him at an event in which the ghost of a bold, proud U.S. President would upstage him, where a famous speech and a historic day would necessarily reduce any Obama-speech to a shallow, pastel-patchwork of generic references that, again, would be upstaged by the memory of a strong leader and what that strong leader did on that day.

President Obama does not want to be upstaged. His speeches require stacked audiences, Styrofoam Greek pillars, ever more numerous teleprompters. A speech from the heart, written on paper, the way many great leaders have done, well, that is simply not the kind of over-produced, micro-managed style to which President Obama demands.

Another reason President Obama will not be attending comes from J.E. Dyer, in a wonderful post at Hot Air, in which he says, “Yet for Obama it seems not to matter much at all.  Oddly enough, he was born only a few days before East Germany began building the wall, on the night of 13 August 1961.  He did spend the 1980s in a different way, dabbling in the Nuclear Freeze movement while he was at Columbia, going to Harvard Law, and becoming a community activist in Chicago.  Perhaps the liberation of Eastern Europe from the Soviet yoke does mean less to him than it does to many of us.”

Dyer continues: “It’s entirely possible, in light of his many criticisms of the United States, that he believes we were at fault for whatever was going wrong in Europe between 1945 and 1989 anyway.  Perhaps his view is, as the more left-leaning of Western leftists argued in the 1970s and ‘80s, that the Berlin Wall was erected because we were too bellicose and threatening, and gave the Communists of East Germany no choice.”

Whatever the reason for President Obama’s decision not to go, he has once again done exactly the opposite of what my gut tells me a U.S. President should do, and in that manner at least, he has not disappointed.