He Was Supposed to Be Competent

By Peggy Noonan - Wall street Journal The spill is a disaster for the president & his political philosophy. I dont see how the presidents position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his 3rd political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all as they say unforced errors meaning they were shaped by the presidents political judgment and instincts.  

• There was the tearing and unnecessary war over his health-care proposal and its cost.
• There was his day-to-day indifference to the views and hopes of the majority of voters regarding illegal immigration.
• And now the past almost 40 days of dodging and dithering in the face of an environmental calamity.

I dont see how you politically survive this. The president in my view continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not almost from the day he was inaugurated been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A B and C and he is thinking about X Y and Z. Theyre in one reality hes in another. The American people have spent at least two years worrying that high government spending would in the end undo the republic. They saw the dollars gushing night and day and worried that while everything looked the same on the surface our position was eroding. They have worried about a border that is in some places functionally and of course illegally open that it too is gushing night and day with problems that states cities and towns there cannot solve. And now we have a videotape metaphor for all the publics fears: that clip we see every day on every news show of the well gushing black oil into the Gulf of Mexico and toward our shore. You actually dont get deadlier as a metaphor for the moment than that the monster that lives deep beneath the sea. In his news conference Thursday President Obama made his position no better. He attempted to act out passionate engagement through the use of heightened languagecatastrophe etc.but repeatedly took refuge in factual minutiae. His staff probably thought this demonstrated his command of even the most obscure facts. Instead it made him seem like someone who wont see the big picture. The unspoken mantra in his head must have been I will not be defensive I will not give them a resentful soundbite. But his strategic problem was that hed already lost the battle. If the well was plugged tomorrow the damage will already have been done. The original sin in my view is that as soon as the oil rig accident happened the president tried to maintain distance between the gusher and his presidency. He wanted people to associate the disaster with BP and not him. When your most creative thoughts in the middle of a disaster revolve around protecting your position you are summoning trouble. When you try to dodge ownership of a problem when you try to hide from responsibility life will give you ownership and responsibility the hard way. In any case the strategy was always a little mad. Americans would never think an international petroleum company based in London would worry as much about American shores and wildlife as say Americans would. They were never going to blame only BP or trust it. I wonder if the president knows what a disaster this is not only for him but for his political assumptions. His philosophy is that it is appropriate for the federal government to occupy a more burly significant and powerful place in Americaconfronting its problems of need injustice inequality. But in a way and inevitably this is always boiled down to a promise:

Trust us here in Washington we will prove worthy of your trust. Then the oil spill came and government could not do the job could not meet need in fact seemed faraway and incapable: We pay so much for the government and it cant cap an undersea oil well!

This is what happened with Katrina and Katrina did at least two big things politically. The first was draw together everything people didnt like about the Bush administration everything it didnt like about two wars and high spending and illegal immigration and brought those strands into a heavy knot that just sat there soggily and came to symbolize Bushism. The second was illustrate that even though the federal government in our time has continually taken on new missions and responsibilities the more it took on the less it seemed capable of performing even its most essential jobs. Conservatives got this pointthey know it without being toldbut liberals and progressives did not. They thought Katrina was the result only of George W. Bushs incompetence and conservatives failure to believe in government. But Mr. Obama was supposed to be competent. Remarkable too is the way both BP and the government 40 days in continue to act shocked shocked that an accident like this could have happened. If youre drilling for oil in the deep sea of course something terrible can happen so you have a plan on what to do when it does. How could there not have been a plan? How could it all be so ad hoc so inadequate so embarrassing? Were plugging it now with tires mud and golf balls? What continues to fascinate me is Mr. Obamas standing with Democrats. They dont love him. Half the party voted for Hillary Clinton and her people have never fully reconciled themselves to him. But he is what they have. They are invested in him. In timeafter the 2010 elections go badlythey are going to start to peel off. The political operative James Carville the most vocal and influential of the presidents Gulf critics signaled to Democrats this week that they can start to peel off. He did it through the passion of his denunciations. The disaster in the Gulf may well spell the political end of the president and his administration and that is no cause for joy. Its not good to have a president in this positionweakened polarizing and lacking broad public supportless than halfway through his term. That it is his fault is no comfort. It is not good for the stability of the world or its safety that the leader of the indispensable nation be so weakened. I never until the past 10 years understood the almost moral imperative that an American president maintain a high standing in the eyes of his countrymen. Mr. Obama himself when running for president made much of Bush administration distraction and detachment during Katrina. Now the Republican Party will understandably go to town on Mr. Obamas having gone only once to the gulf and the fund-raiser in San Francisco that seemed to take precedence and the EPA chief who decided to skip a New York fund-raiser only after the press reported that she planned to attend. But Republicans should beware and even mute their mischief. Were in the middle of an actual disaster. When they win back the presidency theyll probably get the big California earthquake. And theyll probably blow it. Because ironically enough of a hard core of truth within their own philosophy: when you ask a government far away in Washington to handle everything it will handle nothing well. (Correction: The EPA chief skipped the New York fund-raiser. An earlier version of this column said that she had attended it.)