Tom Shales in The Washington Post claims the media is shifting blame for the handling of the oil spill to President Obama to prevent viewers from getting all worn out at watching this disaster spread and spread. What interests me is the consensus that's been reached weeks after Deepwater Horizon collapsed into the Gulf - the message that Obama responded too slowly to the crisis.
Eerie how familiar it all is. George W. Bush was widely chastised for responding too slowly after Hurricane Katrina hit, but that criticism first appeared fairly early, once it was clear that the state of New Orleans and the Gulf coast was worse than anyone had anticipated.
Because of this, Obama has been exceedingly careful not to respond "too slowly" to any crisis, staying vocal on big events like the apparent North Korean torpedo strike, and making efforts to at least address the majority of his campaign promises - if not fulfill them - within months of taking office, rather than let them dissipate in the quotidian tides as most candidates-turned-elected officials do.
So why so slowly come to the conclusion that Obama's sluggishness somehow escalated this "spill" to what some people in the restaurant where I work call "World War III," "Armageddon," the blacking out of the entire Atlantic Ocean? It's a strangely unqualified accusation. What is it that he should have done? All I can find is a call to anger, a criticism of his apparent emotional detachment from the whole ordeal. But I want my president to be a means to level-headed action and solution, not a simple funnel for all of our fears. Leave the emotions to us; we're all hurting quite enough as it is over this tragic encroaching behemoth.
Given this request, however, Obama can be said to have been neither. The president's speech last night hardly offered any solid solutions for right now. Every moment results in innumerable deaths - unquantifiable losses that will affect us in ways we can't yet imagine. Let's plan for the recovery, let's find who to blame, but Obama, let's also get that cap on securely, find a better alternative to boom, crack down on BP's brash deafness to the EPA's nix on dispersants. (Echo of years of shadowy assurances and back-room pacifications?)
At least the president has put a hold on new drilling; maybe once we've found ourselves alive and relatively well after this experiment America will be more open to discussion on alternative energies. The promise for those, Obama hasn't lived up to yet, not so long as he opens up new drilling sites in areas environmentalists fought for years to protect. Time to act decisively, then. Let's start the prodigious and all-important project of capping them all. For good.
TIP:
Enter the amount, and click "Tip" to submit!
ajadedoptimist
old new lefty
Max the Communist
Joan Walsh
Kerry Lauerman
Sandra Stephens
Salon.com
Comments
Less talk, more action. He is doing now what he should have been doing at least 6 weeks ago. And I voted for him!
@Bill: Shooting a rifle is only done well when calm. Excellent point there.
Thanks for all the insightful comments, guys - keep 'em coming!
Sorry but intelligent CEOs don't solve problems with anger, . . . they do, however, require intelligence, which is apparently lacking in the White House.
Speech making is easy, and the really good preachers get to fill their collection boxes, but running a successful business or successful economy is highly difficult. Running a country, . . . even more so.
Saying that people are looking for "passion," is silly. What common sense individuals are looking for is decisiveness. More promotion of a political agenda, like the Cap and Trade boondoggle, is inappropriate. Put the nose of those responsible for the mess to the grindstone, and don't let go.
R~
As far as I am concerned I would rather have a level headed leader than the "by the gut" leader we had two years ago.
I think the situation in the gulf is bad enough, and the gulf waters are gettting sufficiently polluted without trying to detonate a nuclear warhead down there. Gee, what could go wrong with THAT plan? It's just solving one problem by replacing it with one that's potentially even WORSE.
Careful those of you who think Obama will be a one-termer. If six months is an eternity in politics, two years is four eternities. Nobody can predict what will happen by 2012. I'd like to see more of what we were promised in the campaign. Id' also wish greed and stupidity hadn't nearly bleeped up our economy in 2008.
the public can not act, the government dare not roil the waters, bp need merely sit quietly and let the show trial amuse the 6 o'clock news, and nothing will change.
i think obama is merely a coldly practical politician who told enough lies to get elected and will tell enough more to get reelected. fewer will be deceived the second time around, but the alternative will be a republican.
americans get the government they deserve, and anything you say about obama should be viewed as a measure of the society he has fooled.
i don't know how people go on voting for politicians, when the results are so consistently horrible. perhaps american education has been too long in the control of the texas board of education. or maybe they are just dumb.
Since there's no answer to many of these questions, people want raw meat. It would be nice if Obama could strip to his skivvies, put a knife to his teeth, and dive down to take care of the problem. But the Spewcam just reinforces the fact that even the US government and BP are powerless on this.
I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore! Uh -- can you tell me who I should be mad at?
Comparison to Katrina? Katrina was a hurricane, the like of which we have seen before and will see again. We've had plenty of chances to refine our response to such and proved it in the years previous to Katrina, most notably in the very year before Katrina when FEMA deftly handled the four storms that strafed Florida.
The Deepwater Horizon spill? There was absolutely no precedent for it.
If Obama can be faulted for anything is embracing the pro-business, corporatist, right wing philosophies that not only facilitated this fiasco initially but that are also revered by the president's most strident critics.
For instance, Obama was criticized for not being on hand. When he arrived, he was criticized for exploiting tragedy for a photo op.
When he took measures to prevent this from happening again -- hampering deep sea drilling -- the very folks crying loudest about the oil seeping into their marshes then bitched about his measures to prevent it in the future.
It's a lose-lose for him.
Someone at HuffPo was trying to connect the Deepwater Horizon disaster with 9/11. I had to admonish that directly.
An analogy like an American Chernobyl is fine.
But WWIII!?! End Times!?! 9/11 Part Two!?! Oh geez...
The, uh, freak-out factor is running high in the country.
For some reason many Americans feel this need for their president to reflect their emotional state in some kind of populist rant. I'm guilt of this too. I was saying this at first, but upon review of my position it is not a fair thing to ask of Obama in the first place.
It amounts to: "Act like someone you are not!" Which is just unfair to ask of anyone.
Obama is way too cool and collected compared to raving progressivism and anti-corporatist rhetoric of we out here calling this president a "centrist" to date.
Another way to put it is he has too much class to spout off.
If anyone thinks they can threaten the oil industry, think again.
Big oil owns countries and where they dont own countries, they own enough politicians to make countries behave. This one included.
At least, Obama did say he was "informing" BP they would be creating, funding and not administering an escrow to support those affected and pay for clean up. And in reality, the use of informing was really strong words. But when one reads and hears of the extent to which the "cleanup" (read "coverup") is being directed by BP through the aegis of the Coast Guard one questions just how far Obama will be able to lead BP ("Beyond Prosecution?") to the trough of responsibility.
And no amount of displayed anger would change that. Real change only will come by getting the corporate hand out of the governmental sockpuppet.
No company has ever capped a rupture at this depth.
Put a cap on your Zanax script and stop talking like a fool.