This along with the Rabinowitz piece I'll post in a second both tell, in a sense, the very same tale.
If Todd Palin was the First Dude, Obama is the First Dud. Ugh.
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Obama fails the test of leadership
By: Keith Koffler
June 3, 2010 01:56 PM EDT |
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs tweeted to the world recently that President Barack Obama had on his night table “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt,” Edmund Morris’s rip-roaring, Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the formative years of America’s most colorful president.
Presumably, Gibbs was implying that the great man now occupying the White House was taking pointers from the great man who preceded him.
Politicians just love to see themselves as leaders like Teddy Roosevelt or Winston Churchill — giants who trampled over obstacles with unyielding doggedness and even a kind of childlike insouciance.
As Obama underachieves his way through the Gulf of Mexico oil spill crisis, Gibbs’s effort to link the president to Roosevelt makes the opposite point intended: Great leaders are a very rare thing, and the man in the White House today ain’t one of them — at least not yet.
Obama’s detached performance with respect to this massive and growing crisis — the ripple effects of which could still be with us on Election Day 2012 — is generally portrayed as a PR meltdown and a simple failure to step up by an understandably beleaguered Obama.
“It’s impossible not to feel sorry for President Obama,” writes Maureen Dowd in The New York Times, “pummeled by the cascading disasters, at home and abroad.”
Well, it’s possible.
Obama’s failure to convey any hint of genuine emotion, to rouse the American people to turn their hearts toward the Gulf and to assure them that their world — still built on the plentiful supply of fossil fuels — is not falling apart, is a profound failure of leadership.
Instead of offering reassurance, the president is using the crisis to promote his political agenda, hankering for alternative energy and climate change legislation in Congress — though there won’t be any significant replacement of carbon-based power sources for years to come.
Instead of an uplifting message of unity rallying the country to confront the horror and assuring all Americans that we will deal successfully, one way or another, with its disastrous effects, the nation is treated to petty lecturing of BP — even a refusal to let BP evildoers sully the stage the administration uses to discuss the latest failures.
The very company the administration needs to work with to stop the bleeding is vilified and threatened with criminal prosecution.
This separates Obama from the “bad guys.” But it also likely harms the stoppage effort by creating a climate of suspicion and forcing BP to focus on PR and legal CYA operations while trying to plug the well.
The spill is becoming one of the great catastrophes the country has faced. Think of how other presidents have risen to the occasion under similar circumstances.
Who can forget that moment when, touring the ruins of the World Trade Center, former President George W. Bush — with a spontaneity hard to imagine from Obama — grabbed a bullhorn and declared to the workers at ground zero that revenge was coming:
“I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon! The nation — the nation sends its love and compassion — to everybody who is here.” Or remember President Bill Clinton’s emotional meeting in April 1995, a few days after the Oklahoma City tragedy, with the families of those killed in the truck-bomb attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and his moving speech at the memorial service afterward.
That moment helped the country work through its grief and began Clinton’s political rebirth after the massive GOP sweep of November 1994.
And what do we get from Obama?
A bloodless news conference at which even his description of his daughter beseeching him as to whether the crisis was solved was given with all the emotion of, say, Michael Dukakis.
We get a trip to the Gulf — only his second since the crisis began — where he lands on a beach spiffed up in advance for his visit.
The White House dutifully puts out a longish press release each night, detailing the latest effort in the Gulf and which, I can guarantee you, the White House press corps dutifully ignores or deletes in spin avoidance mode.
Churchill is, of course, best known for becoming one with his country as he led it through World War II.
But there’s a photo of him much earlier in life, as home secretary, intently directing a massive police siege on the hideout of a gang of criminals. He’d heard about the activity while in his bath, rushed to the office and, finding nothing to do, went directly to the theater of action.
“I must ... admit that convictions of duty were supported by a strong sense of curiosity which perhaps it would have been well to keep in check," Churchill later modestly wrote.
But while he got some bad PR for his move, Churchill was a fountain of ideas on the scene and may have saved lives.
Roosevelt, of course, has a similarly long CV detailing his qualities as a man of action. As the de facto leader of the Navy Department, for example, he prepared the country for the Spanish-American War and then resigned his post to go fight it.
The point is that great men such as these are congenitally incapable of not taking a hands-on leadership role during a crisis.
Obama instead went to a sanitized beach.
As of last week, he hadn’t even spoken to BP CEO Tony Hayward. He’s due to make his third trip to the region Friday, more than six weeks after the crisis began.
If he’s actually reading that Roosevelt bio, he’d know that his predecessor would have been — when not himself knee-deep in mucky oil — immersed in the local population during strolls from his personal command post in New Orleans.
Obama would be lucky if he was just having a PR disaster.
Unfortunately for the country, he is failing the test of leadership.
Keith Koffler, who covered the White House as a reporter for CongressDaily and Roll Call, is editor of the blog White House Dossier. |
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Obama fails the test of leadership - Keith Koffler - POLITICO.com
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