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EVE OF DESTRUCTION
This entry was posted on 5/29/2010 3:45 PM and is filed under uncategorized.
We give the President more work than a man can do,
more responsibility than a man should take, more pressure than a man can
bear. We abuse him often and rarely praise him. We wear him out, use
him up, eat him up. And with all this, Americans have a love for the
President that goes beyond loyalty or party nationality; he is ours, and
we exercise the right to destroy him.
--[John Steinbeck, America and Americans
(1946), p. 46]
Over the past month or so, since the terrible catastrophe in the Gulf, when I found myself unable to write because of the profound depression that settled over me--the grief over the loss of sea life and the death of a way of life for so many who live and make their living on that body of water--and as I fretted over how this was impacting the president and whether or not he was acting or reacting in the "right" way, I began to think about leadership; what makes a good leader, and what we, as a nation, expect of our leaders, and how, over the past decade, our concept of leadership got so perverted and twisted out of shape by flim-flam men and media fakery.
The loudest voices have, of course, been screaming for our president to make a grand, emotional, sweeping gesture down on the Gulf, and those voices, we all know, have not all been conservative Republicans:
"The president of the United States could've come down here, he could've
been involved with the families of these 11 people" who died on the
offshore rig, (James) Carville said. "He could've demanded a plan in
anticipation of this."
"It just looks like he's not involved in this," an angry Carville said
on "GMA." "Man, you got to get down here and take control of this, put
somebody in charge of this thing and get this moving. We're about to die
down here."
Of course, like most other media spokespersons that I have watched in the past weeks, Carville's memory was highly selective. It seems he--and they--forgot completely that President Obama DID, actually, visit the Gulf once before, back on May 2, when he went to Venice, Louisiana , and said, among other things:
They
gave me a sense of how this spill is moving. It is now about nine miles
off the coast of southeastern Louisiana.
And by the way, we had the Governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, as well
as
parish presidents who were taking part in this meeting, because we want
to
emphasize the importance of coordinating between local, state, and
federal
officials throughout this process.
Now,
I think the American people are now aware, certainly the folks down in
the Gulf
are aware, that we're dealing with a massive and potentially
unprecedented
environmental disaster. The oil that is still leaking from the well
could
seriously damage the economy and the environment of our Gulf states and
it could extend for a long
time. It could jeopardize the livelihoods of thousands of Americans who
call this place home.
And
that's why the federal government has launched and coordinated an
all-hands-on-deck, relentless response to this crisis from Day One.
After
the explosion on the drilling rig, it began with an aggressive
search-and-rescue effort to evacuate 115 people, including three badly
injured. And my thoughts and prayers go out to the family of the 11
workers who have not yet -- who have not been found.
When
the drill unit sank on Thursday, we immediately and intensely
investigated by
remotely operated vehicles the entire 5,000 feet of pipe that's on the
floor of
the ocean. In that process, three leaks were identified, the most
recent
coming just last Wednesday evening. As Admiral Allen and Secretary
Napolitano have made clear, we've made preparations from day one to
stage
equipment for a worse-case scenario. We immediately set up command
center
operations here in the Gulf and coordinated with all state and local
governments. And the third breach was discovered on
Wednesday.
But that's okay, James. I assume you were too busy with your T.V. appearances to take note. Carville's been so busy, in fact, that he may not realize that his angry diatribes against his own president are now being used in Republican fund-raising e-mails, which I'm sure was the idea of his wife, Republican strategist Mary Matalin, who stood beside him during one interview.
Another thing Carville might not have noticed during his busy Bash-Obama tour is that the president had Adm. Thad Allen of the Coast Guard--you know, the guy who's in charge of the entire recovery mission and who is in closest contact with BP--call James Carville to see if he could alleviate any of his worries and fears, but the call went to voice mail and, so far, Carville hasn't called him back.
Apparently, he's busier than Adm. Allen right now.
So, since the Ragin' Cagun is so hysterically outraged at the terrible horrible no good job our president is doing at assuming leadership of this crises, I assumed that he was equally horrified at the job President Bush had done following Hurricane Katrina, so I spent no small amount of time this morning looking up various configurations of "James Carville, " "President George W. Bush," "Hurricane Katrina," "August, 2005," "September, 2005," and so forth on Google. I went through 10 or 12 pages, and the only time James Carville's name popped up with those references, they ALWAYS included a reference to 2010 and Barack Obama, so apparently, he had very little to say on-air or publicly in criticism of George W. Bush in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
My Google-search revealed that Carville moved to New Orleans following Katrina, so maybe not living down there had something to do with it, I don't know. But apparently he was not on all the talk shows and news programs railing against President Bush at the time because if he was I could not find it, although, if you Google references to "James Carville, "Obama," and "BP," you can find page after page of references to Carville's rants.
I guess he likes to reserve his hottest vitriol for former opponents of the Clintons.
But, in all fairness to Carville, he's not the only Democrat going after Obama for what they perceive to be his lack of leadership these days. Bob Herbert ripped him a new one in this morning's New York Times:
With all due respect to the president, who is a very smart man, how is
it possible for anyone with any reasonable awareness of the nonstop
carnage that has accompanied the entire history of giant corporations to
believe that the oil companies, which are among the most rapacious
players on the planet, somehow “had their act together” with regard to
worst-case scenarios.
These are not Little Lord Fauntleroys who can be trusted to abide by
some fanciful honor system. These are greedy merchant armies drilling
blindly at depths a mile and more beneath the seas while at the same
time doing all they can to stifle the government oversight that is
necessary to protect human lives and preserve the integrity of the
environment.
President Obama knows that. He knows — or should know — that the
biggest, most powerful companies do not have the best interests of the
American people in mind when they are closing in on the kinds of profits
that ancient kingdoms could only envy. BP’s profits are counted in the
billions annually. They are like stacks and stacks of gold glittering
beneath a brilliant sun. You don’t want to know what people will do for
that kind of money.
Ooooo-kay. Evil robber barons. Can't be trusted. Got it. Soooo...what's the president supposed to do? Well, apparently, according to Herbert, he can't trust the government, either:
When is the United States going to get its act together? Will we
learn anything from this disaster or will we simply express our
collective dismay, ignore the inevitable commission reports (no one pays
attention to study commissions), and bury our heads back in the oily
sand?
President Obama said on Thursday that his administration was “moving
quickly on steps to ensure that a catastrophe like this never happens
again.” Well, he can’t ensure anything of the kind. And, in fact, his
corporate-friendly policy of opening up new regions for offshore
drilling (that policy is only temporarily halted) will all but guarantee
future disastrous spills.
The U.S. will never get its act together until we develop the courage
and the will to crack down hard on these giant corporations. They need
to be tamed, closely monitored and regulated, and constrained in ways
that no longer allow them to trample the best interests of the American
people.
In an ideal world, I would absolutely, wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Herbert, no question about that. But this is a world in which half of our congress and Senate is held by a party who wants nothing more than to shut the president DOWN, and by a party of his own sprinkled with conservative sympathizers who are pro-gun, pro-life-pro-business, anti-regulation--well, you get my drift.
In the Real World, I'm afraid, Mr. Herbert, Mr. Obama has to GOVERN. And he has to do it with a recalcitrant, reluctant, obstinate congress who fights him every time he opens his mouth on every single little solitary thing. In other words, the man is doing the best he can with what he's got to work with, and it is far from perfect.
And yeah, he's made mistakes in the SIXTEEN MONTHS he's been in office.
But I digress. We were talking critics of leadership. Here's another one from the left, Charles Blow , also from that liberal rag, the New York Times.
There are many things at which the president is extraordinarily gifted.
Emoting isn’t one of them.
Thursday, in the opening remarks of his press conference, the president
said: “Every day I see this leak continue I am angry and frustrated.”
I wasn’t feeling it.
At the end of the piece, he even gets kinda personal with the president:
Mr. President, I know that you have a self-professed aversion to
appearing angry, but in this case you have every right to be angry and
to openly empathize with the anger of others. Otherwise, by running from
one label, you risk earning another — incompetent. You feel me?
Of course, I have read many, many things from conservatives who have derided Obama for being "detached," too "cool and unemotional," too "remote," too "unfeeling," not to mention the fact that everybody seems to think that he's, basically, not been doing anything--including Carville, although I would like to make the point that this is, basically, NOT TRUE:
Fox & Friends guest hosts falsely suggested that there
was a "lack of cleanup going on" in the Gulf Coast oil spill and falsely
suggested Louisiana's barrier plan had been ignored. In fact, cleanup
of the oil spill has been ongoing for more than a month, and the Army
Corps of Engineers responded to the barrier plan -- the effectiveness
of which is being questioned -- and raised concerns that it would push
oil into the Mississippi.
Be that as it may, it seems that we the people seem to think that what is needed at a time like this is for a great moving display of--well, here, let's let the stirring words speak for themselves.
They were spoken just after another terrible national disaster had occurred, by another president, and afterward, all the pundits and talking-heads and op-ed writers on both sides of the aisle felt that this president had shown great leadership, and his poll numbers went up, and everybody felt greatly comforted and encouraged and hopeful. It was a wonderful moment and a beautiful speech. Here is part of it. I want you to feel as inspired as I did, and then, afterward, I'll explain where and when so you can read the whole thing for yourself:
We are the heirs of men and women who lived through those first
terrible winters at Jamestown and Plymouth, who rebuilt Chicago after a
great fire, and San Francisco after a great earthquake, who reclaimed
the prairie from the dust bowl of the 1930s.
Every time, the
people of this land have come back from fire, flood, and storm to build
anew -- and to build better than what we had before. Americans have
never left our destiny to the whims of nature, and we will not start
now.
These trials have also reminded us that we are often stronger
than we know with the help of grace and one another. They remind us of a
hope beyond all pain and death -- a God who welcomes the lost to a
house not made with hands.
And they remind us that we are tied
together in this life, in this nation and that the despair of any
touches us all.
I know that when you sit on the steps of a porch
where a home once stood or sleep on a cot in a crowded shelter, it is
hard to imagine a bright future. But that future will come.
That's beautiful, isn't it? And it wasn't just beautiful words, either. The speech was chock-full of information of concrete things that were going to be done for the survivors of this catastrophe, help that was on the way, recovery and rebuilding that had already begun, federal money and help that had been mobilized.
It was just the kind of LEADERSHIP that we have come to EXPECT from our presidents, and boy WE GOT IT, on that day, SEPTEMBER 15, 2005, IN JACKSON SQUARE, NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA.
That's right. President George W. Bush and his crew came in, set up generators, lit up the square--residents said later they were the only lights in the entire area, and that when the president left, they took the lights--and the generators--with them.
All right, okay, he gave a speech, he talked about things he was putting before Congress.
So...what happened at the State of the Union address, FIVE MONTHS later?
In the president's State of the Union speech last year, delivered just
five months after the disaster, the devastation merited only 156 words
out of more than 5,400.
Say WHAT?
That's right. He had already turned his attention away from the Gulf and moved on to other things. In other words, you bet he knew how to make the big bold dramatic "leadership" gesture. NOBODY knew how to do it better with the exception of Ronald Reagan. Just like nobody knew how to pose himself in front of "the troops" and act as if he loved them, then send them into battle with shoddy equipment and crappy weapons and insufficient troops in an open-ended mission in an endless war. But hey, he sure loved the troops because the camera loved him in front of them, right?
But I digress. What was Bush saying about New Orleans at the State of the Union in January of 2007?
Crickets:
New Orleans is still a mess and the pace of recovery across the Gulf
Coast from Hurricane Katrina's strike remains achingly slow after 17
months. But none of this captured President Bush's attention on the
year's biggest night for showcasing policy priorities...
On Tuesday night...Katrina
received not a single mention.
"At this time I almost broke my
TV, knocked it off the stand," Chris Davis, told CBS News chief
investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian. Davis, a Vietnam
veteran, is one of the displaced residents from New Orleans now living
near Baton Rouge, La.
"People were already feeling forgotten. I
think this may potentially reinforce that," Toni Bankston, a mental
health caseworker, told CBS News.
It is true that President Obama can give wonderful, stirring speeches that can inspire and motivate, but it is also true that he can roll up his sleeves and work like a pack mule when there is a crises at hand, and the fact of the matter is that the White House has been submerged in this thing from the beginning, without the flowery words or television cameras.
What happened with Bush was that he and his handlers knew from Day One when he started running for office and decided to buy himself that Reaganesque "ranch" that if you just propped him up in a stirring location (think "Mission Impossible") that the sound-bite savages would drool all over it for a full 24-hour news cycle and they would own it, they would not have to have any substance behind it.
So when, for example, he announced this "vision" to put men on Mars, it sounded fantastic! Wonderful! Visionary! And there were great sound-bites to it, too! But the TRUTH is that he gave NASA NO money to meet that goal, and they've been scrambling to find it in-house, which is one reason their space program was in such disarray when Obama took office.
As we say in Texas, Bush's entire presidency was "all hat and no cattle." (Just like his fake ranch.)
But we got spoiled to it and now we expect it of our new president. We get disappointed in him when he doesn't come swaggering out with that weepy break in his voice and that tear in his eye that Bush used to get, or that big bear-hug that Clinton used to have, and we think that somehow he's just not doing his job.
But if you would really, truly like some real, true perspective--historical, ethical, philosophical, and practical, on what leadership means, I strongly suggest you read the following essay, "Gleaves Whitney on Leadership."
Now, don't be frightened. Yes, it is dense, and yes, it is long. But this is a holiday weekend, and it is conversational in tone, broken into easy-to-read segments, and fascinating. Most of his historical comparisons are recent--Bill Clinton, Franklin Roosevelt, JFK, Reagan, and so forth. If you get to a paragraph that seems boring--some go back to ancient Greece--skip over it but don't quit--I urge you to scroll on down because it gets better and better as it goes on, delving into the qualities that mark a true leader, and why.
One thing that interested me, for example, was on the concept of CHANGE. A true leader, he says, sees visionary, dramatic change, and he sees it far into the future--not just until the next election. Those who insist upon just incremental, easy-to-absorb steps LEADING to change, he says, are MANAGERS, not LEADERS.
Ultimately, I found that President Barack Obama possessed almost all of the qualities of a true leader listed in this article. The one area where I thought he and his team fell down sometimes was in their ability to ANTICIPATE how their policies would be accepted or received by most people, but in all the other areas, which is truly extraordinary, I saw this president excel.
At the end of the piece, Mr. Whitney discusses how the savagery of the 24-hour news cycle and the Internet make a practice of tearing down leaders before they can even find their footing--and that is where I found the quote that ledes this piece.
But at the very end, he simply reproduces Rudyard Kipling's marvelous poem, "If," that says, in part:
If you can keep your head when all
about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
[...]
If you can talk with crowds and
keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man {substitute leader} my son!
Corny, to some extent, yes, but still applicable today, particularly in the light of leadership.
I'm not saying everything the president has done has been right--he's not saying that either. There are days, as I joked to a friend, that I've felt as if we've had our "first lover's quarrel," meaning, though I've approved of most everything else he's done since taking office, I've been upset over his handling of this.
(Mr. Greaves even talks about how we "fall in love" with our leaders, in the sense of a sort of friendship, using an aide to Teddy Roosevelt as a wonderful example.)
That said, I do think that one thing about this administration you can trust--and one of the qualities of true leadership mentioned in the essay linked to above (and most definitely NOT present in the last administration)--is its adaptability.
In other words, when they are making a mistake, they course-correct.
And one more thing.
THEY KEEP THEIR PROMISES.
According to PolitiFact, a nonpartisan website that has been tracking President Obama since he took office, he made something like 500 campaign promises. So they've been watching to see if he's kept any of them. And so far, the record is pretty damn impressive. I'm having trouble picking up that link so here it is like this:
ttp://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/
In the first 16 months the man has been in office, he's kept 113 promises, and a whopping 253 are in the works.
He has "compromised" but gotten somewhere, at any rate, on 34 more.
That makes 400 promises that have either already been kept or are on the way to being kept in one form or another
He has only broken 19.
And that's just in the first 16 months, while working with only half a congress, while the other half has made it their mission in life to obstruct and shut down--if not outright impeach--him.
(It's a fascinating website, and describes each one as it is fulfilled; a fun place to visit for Obama supporters.)
So, he says he's doing all he can to find out how this horror occurred and gather the best minds on the planet to fix it and clean up what's out there as best we can, and help the people along the Gulf shore who make their living off the water, then based on his record so far, I'd say we can believe him, even if he doesn't stand out in front of a bunch of bright lights, tear up, and deliver a stirring speech.
In the meantime, consider this, all you naysayers like James Carville who are so intent on dumping on the President:
WHAT'S THE ALTERNATIVE?
Do you really want to see him defeated in 2012 and somebody like, oh, Mitt Romney or, God forbid, Sarah Palin get into the White House in his place?
Do you HONESTLY think THEY would do a BETTER JOB?
If so, then just keep on bitchin.'
It's one thing to keep the man accountable. Yes, we should all hold him accountable--and he'd be the first to say so.
But the man needs us to have his back, too. And right now, he's getting savaged from the right AND the left, and when the right is using hacks from the left to fund-raise, you know you are in trouble, man.
Do your homework--not just on the mess that's out there, but on what the White House has really been doing.
People on the scene--not just academics called up by cable-news producers who've been nowhere near the site--say the best minds in the world have been hard at it from the beginning:
As someone from the oil industry wrote in to Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo :
At BP's West Houston complex, there's a command center filled with
personnel from around the industry working with BP engineers. Several
drill ships are in place. Tons of workboats are on site. There are 5
or more ROVs roaming the wellhead monitoring and cleaning things up.
They're already bumping into each other because they normally work solo
while tied to a ship by a mile long umbilical cable. They don't need
more ROVs down there adding to the traffic. All these efforts are
reported heavily in the Houston Chronicle and nola.com, but doesn't seem
to get much for national coverage. If you only monitor the national
coverage, you'd think BP is going it alone while we all sit by, but the
reality is this is an industry-wide effort because we all know what's at
stake.
On having Obama "do more," WTF is he supposed to do? Everybody seems
to be calling for more fire in his belly and scary, threatening
speeches. What does that accomplish? It's like people want him to do a
dramatic speech like post-9/11 about bringing the criminals to justice.
It does nothing to actually plug the damn well.
I've seen many of the same "experts" come on various programs with the same half-baked ideas, and the anchors don't know but to take them seriously, and those ideas made it into the president's news conference, forcing him to respond to them patiently, carefully, explaining why--even though they may have worked on one kind of oil spill 30 years ago in one kind of body of water using one kind of technique, they would not work HERE.
Politics is perception, they say, and the perception right now is that President Obama isn't doing very well at taking leadership of this crises. He has made some mis-steps, true. But I think that it might be helpful if those of us in his own party would, once in a while, cut him some slack, give him the benefit of the doubt.
At the news conference, he pointed out that he grew up in Hawaii where, he said, "The ocean is sacred," and he hesitated just for a moment. In that moment, I saw everything I needed to see in his eyes. He does not like to choke up on-camera, but for him, that was an emotional moment. To him, the ocean IS sacred.
Everybody else pointed out the story about his little girl, Malia, asking if he'd "plugged the hole yet" as his "human" moment, but for me, it was that one right there. The ocean is sacred and he knows what it means to grow up on or near the sea and to love it. He is doing everything he can.
And trust me. I have no doubt that if he'd come out with some big speech, they'd have been crawling all over him, crying that he was "politicizing the tragedy."
People on the right HATE this man and want to destroy him. They do not want to run him out of office. They want to destroy him. Even now they're ginning up some crazy impeachment scheme after spending more than a year chasing after bogus claims that he wasn't qualified to BE president because he wasn't born here.
I, for one, consider him to be one of the greatest leaders of his generation, and I believe that in spite of everything he will go down in history as a great president, IF, we, as a party, do not contribute to that destruction.
Carville, do you feel me?
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