Barack Obama, despite being a Harvard grad, former U.S. senator and president of the United States, has something in common with the average American: He doesn't own a vacation home, either. And that oversight is causing him all sorts of trouble.

Presidents who come into office with vacation homes, no matter how elaborate, get a pass when they go there, even when, like Ronald Reagan, they stay there for weeks on end. John F. Kennedy had the family compound at Hyannisport on Cape Cod. George H.W. Bush had the family summer manse at Kennebunkport, Maine. Lyndon Johnson had his Texas ranch. And Franklin Roosevelt had Campobello in Canada, technically a foreign country.

Roosevelt got away with it, but Americans don't take kindly to their leaders taking foreign vacations. Michelle Obama was savaged for going to a five-star hotel on Spain's Costa del Sol with a few friends.

The headline on a column in the New York Daily News compared her to Marie Antoinette, a ludicrously overwrought comparison. But with the U.S. economy still in the toilet, it was not the savviest public-relations move.

The columnist, Andrea Tantaros, suggested Camp David instead: "A long weekend there would really send a message of responsibility, leadership and compassion."

Camp David is in a beautiful part of Maryland, the kind of place that defines "rustic," and Reagan and Jimmy Carter both loved it there. But after exhausting the giddy excitement of shooting skeet and pitching horseshoes, you're still on the outskirts of Thurmont, Md. Then again, nothing says compassion and leadership like blasting away at clay pigeons.

The Obama family is wrapping up a vacation in Martha's Vineyard, for which the president was roundly criticized because it is an upscale venue. He was also criticized when he vacationed there last year.

The Clintons also holidayed there. Bill Clinton's political handlers thought Martha's Vineyard spoke too much of yachts and celebrities, so the Clintons did have one poll-tested vacation in Jackson Hole, Wyo., not a place that exactly screams common man. Every year after that, they went to Martha's Vineyard.

Even there, Obama can't win. If he goes out to eat, golf, shop or sightsee, the locals complain about his 20-vehicle motorcade and his motorcycle escort, over which he has no say, because it ties up traffic.

If he and his family hole up on their rented $20 million seaside estate, the locals complain that they should be out and about, like those nice Clintons, helping the economy by eating, golfing, shopping, sightseeing, etc.

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The Obamas will likely go back to Kilua, Hawaii, for vacation over Christmas. The president was criticized for that, too, although since he's from Hawaii he's technically entitled to go back there.

The home he rented in Hawaii just sold for $6.9 million — $1 million below the asking price; it's an ugly housing market — and conceivably the Obamas could have bought it, even though earning only $400,000 a year the president would have trouble qualifying for an honest mortgage. Surely, however, someone would extend him a liar loan.

But it's politically risky for a president to buy a vacation home while in office. Richard Nixon bought three of them, and look what happened to him. It didn't help that he refurbished the largest of them on the taxpayer's dime.

Obama might want to lift a page from the book of George W. Bush, who would vacation at his Prairie Chapel ranch in sweltering central Texas to cut brush. If Obama did the same, even the wingnuts wouldn't think he was elitist and insensitive to the hardships of ordinary people. They'd think he was nuts.

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