Obama should stop trying to play the cowboy
An oil-covered pelican is treated at a refuge in Fort Jackson, Louisiana
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MANY Americans who elected Barack Obama thought George W Bush was too much the cowboy. After eight years of Texas swagger and a shoot-first-ask-questions-later foreign policy, voters craved the more considered, cerebral and often inspirational persona of a big-city law professor. Now, in the midst of a real crisis, they are having second thoughts.
As gallon upon gallon of oil gushes from BP's broken well into the Gulf of Mexico, they have demanded more anger from their president.
On the campaign trail, the character of "no drama Obama" worked. But when livelihoods and the environment are at risk, the demand is for emotion from the professorial presence in the nation's command centre.
This week Obama has obliged by trying to reveal his inner cowboy. Defending himself against accusations of being too academic in his response to the nation's biggest ever oil leak, he said: "I don't sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar. We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick."
He delved deep into the well of Wild West idiom to promise that he would "ride herd on BP", to ensure the company promptly compensated fishermen and business owners for lost income.
He added that if Tony Hayward, BP's British chief executive, had worked for him, he would have fired him by now.
The crisis has turned into Obama's Hurricane Katrina. His own reputation as chief executive is on the line; and with a 'Washington Post'/ABC poll showing that 69pc of Americans think the government has been "not so good" or "poor" in its handling of the spill, the Democrats' control of Congress is also threatened at the mid-term elections in November.
As Obama tilted from a perceived timidity to clumsy hostility, critics called his "kick ass" line unworthy of his office.
"I think that he lost a lot of credibility there when he used words that were not very presidential," said Republican senator James Inhofe.
Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said that he had seen Obama "clenching his jaw" in anger, and heard him say "plug the damn hole" after the leak was sprung.
The White House evidently feels the president is damned if he does show anger and damned if he doesn't. But both his advisers and the commentators who have demanded more rage have, to an extent, missed the point. It isn't fury that has been lacking, but leadership.
During the presidential campaign, Obama's lack of executive experience was often held against him. Since World War Two, Americans have elected state governors or vice-presidents to the White House. The former have management experience, the latter have been in the thick of Washington action.
Obama's recent actions suggest he lacks both skills.
Only one head has rolled, that of Elizabeth Birnbaum, head of the Minerals Management Service. But during a press conference in late May that was comfortably his least impressive display, Obama confessed he didn't know whether she had resigned or been fired.
There is a case to be made that the Obama administration's response to the spill, if slow and bureaucratic, has not increased the damage caused. Under a law passed after the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska, BP carries responsibility for the clean-up, with oversight provided by the government.
More importantly, only BP possesses the expertise to plug the hole -- the great US military-industrial complex, with all the brains at the Pentagon and NASA, can't really help.
Obama therefore has to cope with the contradiction of being in charge of a crisis that he is virtually impotent to solve. That is a hard thing to explain to a frustrated public that wants more to be done, but he built his reputation as a communicator, not as a second-string cowboy. (© Daily Telegraph, London)
'special relationship' at risk, see page 32
- Alex Spillius in Washington
Irish Independent
