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The Lackadaisical President

First Published May 31, 2010

Everybody has a passion, something they're good at and enjoy doing, be it building nuclear reactors or flipping burgers. Put a given person in a crisis situation, and they'll demonstrate where their passions are and where they are not. We're witnessing just such a circumstance for President Obama with the oil spill.

Obama gave a press conference Thursday in which he did two things. First, he put out a ban on all future off-shore drilling to be in effect through 2011, by which time we will presumably have had sufficient time to figure out what went wrong with the Deepwater Horizon platform, with attendant recommendations for preventing similar future disasters. Second, he took full responsibility for what was happening in the Gulf, a curious political move.

Thus far, most of the public's anger on the issue has been directed at BP, the company who was in control of the drilling operation there, with anger at the government response only really visible locally. But with Obama and his administration taking responsibility for the cleanup efforts to date, including now ordering BP to shut down its 'top kill' operations, public anger across America will now be directed at them.

To date, the federal response to this disaster has been, as former Clinton adviser and longtime Democrat operative James Carville put it, "lackadaisical" at best, and willfully negligent at worst. Only now is Obama putting the resources in place to contain and clean up this spill, tripling the number of government workers and contractor on site to combat a chronic shortage of booms and other equipment necessary to steer the oil away from the coastline. Gov. Jindal of Louisiana had two weeks ago submitted a request for a permit to dredge the floor of the Gulf to build a series of sand berms that would trap the oil 15-20 miles out to sea, protecting the delicate wetlands of the Louisiana coastline. Only in the last few days has he heard back: he can implement 2% of his plan.

Obama campaigned as a man who could lower the seas, a man with a deep commitment to the environment and to nature, a man who could bring peace and harmony to all living things. His passion for the environment and his caring nature were said to be beyond reproach, his bona fides impeccable. Obama advertised himself as a master of assorted skills, the one person capable of fixing the various and sundry problems of this country.

When tested, however, he has consistently shown himself an inexperienced political hack with no concept of what to do with power once he has it. He went days without a response to December's underwear bomber, his response to the Ft. Hood shooting was to say it wasn't a terrorist incident (even though anyone with half a brain could see that it was), and his predominant and perpetual prescription for the financial crisis has been higher taxes and tighter regulation, the two things not needed just now.

But those crises had little to do with Obama's proclaimed strong suits. He never said he was a military expert (while going out of his way to bash them) or a financial wizard (while excoriating them as well), but he has claimed a deep commitment to the environment, and promised to manage our interactions with it with a hitherto unseen efficacy and flair. Instead, he's demonstrating that this also isn't what he's good at.

As I said, if Obama's the man he campaigned as, he should be demonstrating passion and skill in handling this spill. Commentators on the left have actually begun to question his skill, while staunchly defending his claims of passion. Doug Brinkley, former political operative who now teaches history at Rice, said of Obama that "you know he's sickened by this" but that he "needs a bullhorn moment", recalling Bush's inspirational and unifying speech in the aftermath of 9/11. David Gergen, avatar of consensus opinion inside the beltway, thinks that "it's tough, it's very tough, and President Obama clearly cares, and we have to appreciate that. But it's not enough to simply care, you have to take charge."

Obama is only now actually taking charge, though claiming to have been in charge this whole time. His first move? Revamp the failed plan to cap the well that BP tried in the first week after the explosion, only this time on a smaller scale, while banning all further offshore drilling and exploration until 2012 (just in time for his re-election campaign). Nothing about the handling of this screams managerial prowess or skill to me, and apparently not to Carville, Brinkley, and Gergen either.

But I'll go further and also question his compassion. Call me crazy, but I just don't think he cares all that much about the environmental impact of this disaster, and if he did, there'd be fewer people talking about how much he cares and more people talking about how much he's accomplished. As it is, he didn't take credit for anything having to do with it until Thursday, when the spin was that the top kill method might be working. He waited until the disaster was at its peak but, if the top kill was in fact working, was about to recede from that peak, to announce his new ban on further offshore drilling, something he never really wanted to expand in the first place. His timing says to me that he cares less about the environmental impact of this disaster than he does about the political one.

I also note that he's done nothing to openly expedite or obstruct Jindal's plan. This is something Louisiana needs federal permission to implement, but Obama has said nothing substantive about it, one way or the other. So far, Jindal's the only high profile government figure who's come up with a workable large-scale action plan for mitigating the disaster in the coastal regions. It has a high probability of success, and while critics of his plan have said that it would take too long to implement and wouldn't be cost effective (and here I thought BP was going to be footing the bill), one can't help but pointing out that a two week delay, with no response either way from the federal government, hasn't helped, and again, Jindal didn't hear back until it looked like the well-head would be plugged and Obama could take all the front page glory for it in the eyes of the press, while Jindal's plan would have been billed as ineffectual in application in a footnote on page 20.

It may make me a cynic, but I think that has a lot to do with the fact that Jindal's a Republican, and governor of Louisiana to boot. There's been a lot of talk labeling this Obama's Katrina, and so far the response of the Bush administration has been stellar by comparison. But a successful disaster relief plan and action from a Republican governor in that state could too easily invite uncomfortable comparisons in the public eye of what Blanco and Nagen, the Democrat governor and mayor of New Orleans respectively, could have done in the days just prior to Katrina, leaving Obama and the Democrats in an unenviable position as people begin to examine what happened in the series of events leading to the eventual capping of the well and cleanup efforts just in time to go to the ballot boxes in November.

What Obama's good at, what he cares about, is amassing power. He can take advantage of a crisis with the best of them, even fabricating them where they don't already exist, all to further his own radical leftist ideology. He stirs up public opinion effectively, divides and polarizes, then uses that anger to further his agenda. That's what he's good at. That's what he cares about. And that's all he's got a passion for.