When even the media is starting to point out that the incumbent president is too busy campaigning for re-election to govern, you know you have a problem.

Yet that’s precisely what the Associated Press noticed in a new report this morning. The first line: “It’s awfully quiet at the White House these days.”

Sure, when you have a president who spends most of his time on the trail spinning rhetoric and fundraising for his campaign coffers, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will tend to be “awfully quiet.” This might explain why while our Libyan ambassador is dead and our embassies are under repeated siege, the White House still appears to know next to nothing about what went down in Benghazi. Even top Senate Republicans are fuming today that they are learning more details from the New York Times than from closed-door State Department briefing. Unemployment is rising in half of the states, and US industrial production is falling at the sharpest rate in three years, and our President is focused on hard-hitting interviews with radio hosts like Pimp with the Limp. On David Letterman, he casually admitted that he doesn’t know what the national debt is, and that it’s not a pressing concern.

Obama said this week that he has learned you “can’t change Washington from the inside.” Apparently his solution is to go AWOL. It’s definitely not going to change from his campaign re-election HQ in Chicago.

The good news is that every day Americans are not stupid. We notice when our leader is out to lunch. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are talking to voters, discussing real issues, with no spin. Yesterday, Paul Ryan spoke to the AARP about the urgent need to repeal ObamaCare. He was booed (no surprise there considering that AARP is set to profit handsomely from the legislation). Standing up to special interests, that is real leadership, and miles above what we’ve been getting from the White House lately.

The main street media, also known as the biased media wing of the Democrats’ party, can and will do their best to hide this contrast from the American people. That might be why Gallup has reported that trust in the media has reached a depressing but unsurprising low. But real leadership is not something that can be hidden from the voters, and failures in leadership cannot be easily brushed away.