The US President seems stubbornly incapable of on-the-job learning, even in the final quarter of his term. In September he admitted that going out to play golf immediately after a presser about the beheading of American James Foley was bad optics, noting, “Part of this job is also the theater of it.”

But now, just four months later, he is being pilloried by observers across the political spectrum for being AWOL at France’s largest human gathering in its history, Sunday’s Paris march.

Obama didn’t even send Joe Biden or someone recognizable from the cabinet. Attorney General Eric Holder was in Paris that day and appeared on several Sunday shows with the Eiffel tower in the background, but couldn’t be bothered to attend. Only the Ambassador to France (a political appointee known for fundraising) showed up.

Nearly every Monday newspaper front page had a version of the powerful photo below, nicely done by the New York Times.

One assumes that Obama didn’t want to discuss Muslims and their actions in the recent massacres in Paris of journalists and Jewish shoppers. He has been unwilling to admit that Islam is a totalitarian political system as proclaimed in the Koran. In fact, his administration directed all references to Islam as a violent ideology be purged from FBI training materials.

Democrat pollster and consultant Doug Schoen wrote on Monday, “We are at war with radical Islam. And President Obama needs to say it.”

But he won’t.

Here is Schoen’s whole piece: