It’ll take President Barack Obama more than a couple of town hall appearances to get his health care reform proposals back on track because health care isn’t the only thing that needs tweaking—he needs someone on the team to help him figure out how to get his mojo back.

Obama has aides for every occasion: Senior adviser Valerie Jarrett is his liaison to big business; Defense Secretary Bob Gates keeps him on the good foot with the military; Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel patrols Capitol Hill; TARP Czar Elizabeth Warren explains the unexplainable.

What’s missing from the president’s brain trust is a wise, old uncle. He needs someone who’s witnessed the last 50 years of American history from the ground level—a “wise Latino,” if you will.

Someone in the inner circle needs to have the green light to pull the president’s coat on any new proposal and ask him, “Are you kidding me?”

Let’s call him the Secretary of “The Real.”

An uncle would have reminded Obama that “Yes we can” and “We want change” meant “Bush must go” and “Do it yesterday”—not necessarily “Government Option Now.” But who would it be?

Obama’s got plenty of capable people on his team—but so far, the David Axelrods and Robert Gibbses of the world have only had a small sample of what it's like to be black in America.

The qualifications—a man of color who’s been around, made mistakes and lived to tell the tale: Cornell West is too cerebral, Colin Powell is too square, Edward James Olmos is too cool, Bill Cosby has a bigger mojo problem than Obama, and Rev. Jesse Jackson—I mean, come on...

Bill Clinton? Well, almost. But whoever the Secretary of Uncle was, here’s what he’d tell Obama:

“You’re still fighting the last war.”

In the first year of Bill Clinton’s presidency, his administration was bogged down in Somalia—a dubious military campaign in a Muslim country that was started by a predecessor named Bush.

The public was exhausted by Senate confirmation battles, debates over “Motor Voter,” “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and the Family and Medical Leave Act, and then ran out of steam when it came time to have a health care debate.

Sound familiar?

By trying to avoid the narrative of Clinton’s micromanaged, failed health care effort, Obama may have missed the meta-narrative: the success of his presidency is going to be measured by the course that he sets the country on, not how far along that course the country goes in four or eight years. He can’t solve all our problems in a year. Which is why his uncle would tell him...

“You need to get your “A” team on the field.”

And Obama is the “A” team.

Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, last seen pushing a Michael Jackson tribute resolution, took a phone call during her health care town hall meeting. Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s retort to right-wingers attacking her for being “un-American” was to call her critics—wait for it—“un-American.”

Obama would be better off with “Flo” from Progressive Insurance going out there to pitch for him:

Short of that, the president has to accept that he’s Tiger Woods, the caddy and the red shirt all rolled into one. He’s alone on the 18th hole on Sunday. Fellow Democrats just don’t have the stuff.