Obama and the Gulf Spill Anger

Obama and the Gulf Spill Anger
Why does the president need advice on 'whose ass to kick'?

By THOMAS FRANK

These are days of epic foul-ups, colossal crimes, and ripoffs so grandiose they have plunged our entire economy into recession.

And in the Oval Office sits a silver-tongued president, a born orator and a nuanced thinker, a man who was swept into office on the crest of what seemed to be an irresistible movement for "change."

A year ago he seemed to be the ideal man for the moment, the sort of leader who could sketch out for us, in the ringing cadences that are his trademark, a framework for understanding the fantastic villainy of these times. He could zero in on the conflict between private wealth and the public good that has defined so many of our crises. He could change the narrative, define the era.

Today our expectations have fallen so far that we wonder why he never seems to get mad, not even at a foreign oil company. Even to figure out "whose ass to kick," as he put it on Monday, he must convene a panel of experts.

Joe Rago and James Taranto discuss President Obama's moratorium on deepwater off-shore oil drilling and the political and economic havoc the spill has wreaked on coastal areas.

Mr. Obama's squandering of opportunities for change was frustrating during the debates over health care and financial re-regulation, but it was at least possible then to excuse his choices as politically necessary. Powerful forces were arrayed against him, and perhaps the president calculated that compromise was his best bet.

But who does he mollify when he declines to see the obvious significance of an oil spill? Who is forcing him to mute his principles this time? These days even Republicans are calling on him to clean the regulatory house, to crack down, to move more quickly

Let me describe this failing in a more bluntly partisan way. We are now experiencing the biggest environmental disaster in generations—a disaster, mind you, that follows hard on the heels of a campaign in which Mr. Obama's opponents chanted, "Drill, baby, drill"—and yet the party of environmentalism is unable to make political capital out of it. What set of circumstances makes such a perverse outcome possible?

In "The Promise," his new book about the first year of the Obama administration, Jonathan Alter recounts the head-swimming, weeks-long review it undertook to decide on the way forward in Afghanistan. Countless experts were consulted; every scenario was weighed; it was to be, Mr. Alter writes, "the most methodical national security decision in a generation."

I bring this up not merely because it furnishes an extreme example of Mr. Obama's technocratic style, but because it also tells us what is capable of moving him to rage. When leaks seemed to indicate that the Pentagon was trying to steer the Afghanistan deliberations in a particular direction, Mr. Obama summoned his defense secretary and Joint Chiefs chairman and subjected them to what Mr. Alter describes as "the most direct assertion of presidential authority over the U.S. military since President Truman fired General MacArthur." He accused them, among other things, of being "disrespectful of the process."

As though "process" is what leadership is about. As though "process" is what the public rallies behind.

It is customary, of course, to understand Mr. Obama's distance as a personal matter, a product of his years in academia, perhaps, or his curious fixation on detail. But it is also a reflection of the party he leads and the voters for which it increasingly speaks.

After all, Barack Obama is not the first Democrat to offer "competence" as an answer to a period of deeply ideological governance; that was Michael Dukakis back in 1988. And Mr. Obama seems like Demosthenes when his remarks on health care are compared to the town-hall disasters presided over by his tongue-tied, detail-dazzled fellow Democrats last summer.
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Meanwhile, the Democratic Party itself is shifting away from its blue-collar roots toward professionals and well-educated voters. It should not surprise us that its current leader values process so highly and that in the health- care and financial regulation debates he has chosen complex solutions over simpler, better, but more ideological ones. It is an obvious reflection of the way his party is heading.

And while it is fun to trash new-style Democrats for their Ivy League ways, let us also remember that, should you happen to study economics at one of those Ivy League colleges, you will likely imbibe a kind of free-market orthodoxy that would not be out of place in a Wall Street boardroom. The people now flocking to the Democratic Party might eat artisanal foods and zealously sort containers for easy recycling, but they also know that regulation causes more problems than it fixes and that sophisticated people don't use Thirties-style phrases like "economic royalists."

"What's going on now," a friend of mine writes, "is a broad re-education in villainy." The bad guys today don't fit the stereotypes of the last 30 years. Unfortunately, Professor Obama has lost his chance to teach this particular class.