by H. N. Burdett
Pressed to come up with a specific day when President Obama's honeymoon ended with the liberal chattering class, Sunday, May 30, might do as well as any.
On that day, it appeared that the New York Times's triumvirate of left-of-center opinionators -- Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd and Thomas L. Friedman -- had huddled and determined it was time to spit out the mouthpieces, remove the gloves and go after the decider-in-chief tooth and nail.
More to the point, they obviously had had it up to there with what seemed to be the president channeling his inept predecessor with inexplicable inaction regarding BP's inability to plug the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil leak.
The headline over Rich's weekly essay -- "Obama's Katrina? Maybe Worse" -- minced no words in setting the tone for the hymnal that was rendered in three-part op-ed harmony.
Rich recalled that one glaring difference between then and now was that George W. Bush was in his second term when Hurricane Katrina pounded the gulf region relentlessly; the country was more or less prepared for his bungling having already “witnessed two-plus years of his mismanagement of the Iraq war.” He added that W's "laissez-fair response to the hurricane was also consistent with his political DNA as a small-government conservative in thrall of big business.
Lest his readers become fidgety about the audacity of comparing Obama and Bush, Rich reaffirmed his awareness that the two are cut from very different cloth. "Whatever Obama's failings," he writes, "he is infinitely more competent at coping with catastrophe than his predecessor."
With sardonic delight, the column goes on to revisit the horrific late summer of 2005and Bush's emulation of Nero fiddling while Rome was ablaze.By contrast, Rich concludes that the Obama administration was, at least, "engaged with the oil spill from the start" and that "it's still not clear what the president might have done to make a definitive, as opposed to a cosmetic difference in plugging the hole."
Running out of steam after admitting that he hadn't the foggiest idea of what he wanted the president to do other than something, the essay resorted to criticizing as "at least three weeks overdue" the press conference Obama held three days earlier. The president used that occasion to announce the government's response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion and its relationship with BP.
Rich concluded that Obama is "stuck between a rock and a Tea Party" and that his "credibility as a champion of reformed, competent government is held hostage by video footage from the gulf."
Meanwhile, Maureen Dowd typically delights in taking power to task without suggesting, nor even offering a bare hint about what it should be doing that it is not.
She righteously thunders: "For five weeks, it looked as though Obama considered the gushing that became the worst oil spill in U.S. history, a distraction, like a fire alarm going off in the middle of a law seminar he was teaching." An especially nice line for those who enjoy confusing metaphor for substance. Dorothy Parker once said the difference between wit and wisecracking is that the former "has truth in it," while the latter is "simply calisthenics with words." If there were an Olympic medal for those calisthenics, Dowd would be a serious contender.
Dowd took the occasion to scold Obama "and top aides who believe in his divinity" for dismissing "complaints of his aloofness as Washington white noise. He treats the press as a nuisance rather than examining his inability to encapsulate America's feelings." The press seldom embarrasses itself more than when it whines about how it is mistreated by those it routinely skewers. No one bothered to inform Maureen that adversarial relationships -- such as that between the press and politicians -- are two-way streets. The press seems to understand this even less than do politicians.
Dowd closes her column by offering Obama truly bizarre advice. The president, she says, should offer Bill Clinton, who "would certainly know how to gush at a gusher gone haywire," a "cameo" role as "Feeler in Chief" because "the post is open." Her haughtily supercilious reference is to the inability of the "aloof" Obama to publicly display his compassion, which, incidentally, has never been known to plug an oil leak.
I hardly ever read a Maureen Dowd column without shedding a tear of longing for her sisters-in-arms, Mary McGrory and Molly Ivins, may they rest in peace, and thanking the heavens above and each and every star therein for Rachel Maddow.
So it was left to Tom Friedman to once again fill the role of the newspaper’s most consistent, if not only, op-ed page grownup.
He wisely pointed out that the oil leak is not the president’s fault, that it is BP’s responsibility and, moreover, that firm has “the best access to the best technology to plug it.”
But Friedman stressed that Obama has yet to tackle his most important job, which is to exploit the opportunity “to change our national conversation on energy.“ In this line alone, Friedman shows why, though he sometimes may be out-written by his op-ed colleagues, he is seldom out-thought.
"Obama realists” keep telling the president that the Democrats in Congress are suffering from “legislative fatigue” after casting a hard vote for health care, he says, and “they don’t want to be asked to cast a supposedly hard vote for a price on carbon -- the essential first step in getting off oil." Actually lawmakers who feel that way should waste no time seeking employment elsewhere.
Friedman reminds us, as though we need to be, that “the GOP today is so cynical, so bought and paid for by Big Oil, that only a couple of Republican senators would have the courage and vision to vote for a price on carbon. So Democrats would be out there alone.” Score another bulls-eye for Tom. Friedman concludes: ”As you would say, Mr. President, this is your time, this is your moment. Seize it. A disaster is an inexcusable thing to waste.”
Just two days later, a front page off-lead article in The Washington Post announced that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Jr. had been dispatched to the Gulf Coast to meet with federal and state prosecutors. His mission, according to the Post's Joel Achenbach and Jerry Markon, was to determine whether the environmental calamity "might become the subject of a criminal investigation." When power responds to constructive criticism, it is nearly as beautiful as a Beethoven sonata and far more rare.
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