Obama vs. Oil; Chaos vs. Control
By MATT BAI
NYT
WASHINGTON
PRESIDENT Obama is that rare politician who is also a gifted writer, and he understands the power of a good metaphor. So you had to believe, on some level at least, that the president could appreciate the poetic significance of that cloud of oil, ubiquitous on cable television all last week, spewing endlessly from a 5,000-foot-deep puncture in the Gulf of Mexico. Mr. Obama’s administration, too, had been breached, and the accumulating cloud threatened to obscure its considerable achievements — particularly the comprehensive reforms of health care and federal education spending — as the president heads toward the halfway point in his term.
The man-made catastrophe in the gulf does not yet constitute an existential threat to Mr. Obama’s presidency. (There’s not much Mr. Obama can do about it at this point, anyway, short of slapping on a scuba suit and sticking his hand in the pipe until the relief well is completed.) But then, it is never really one crisis that diminishes a president as much as a succession of crises, avoidable or not. And this might be the real danger for Mr. Obama’s administration — not that the spill itself remains unmanageable, but that it comes to represent a pattern in the public mind, a sense that too many dangers at once (mines and foreign economies collapsing, possible war on the Korean peninsula) seem to be gushing beyond his reach.
As much as we talk about ideology and competence, our judgment of presidents doesn’t hinge on either of these things in isolation. What matters is the perception — or perhaps the illusion — that one is shaping events, rather than being shaped by them. The modern presidency, like the old “Get Smart” series, is about chaos versus control.
Take, for instance, the cautionary tale of Jimmy Carter, whose presidency, it is often said, was felled by inflation, or maybe Iranian hostage-takers or gas shortages, depending on who is doing the eulogizing. In fact, inflation was probably at the core of Carter’s troubles. Those other misfortunes contributed, too.
(More here.)
NYT
WASHINGTON
PRESIDENT Obama is that rare politician who is also a gifted writer, and he understands the power of a good metaphor. So you had to believe, on some level at least, that the president could appreciate the poetic significance of that cloud of oil, ubiquitous on cable television all last week, spewing endlessly from a 5,000-foot-deep puncture in the Gulf of Mexico. Mr. Obama’s administration, too, had been breached, and the accumulating cloud threatened to obscure its considerable achievements — particularly the comprehensive reforms of health care and federal education spending — as the president heads toward the halfway point in his term.
The man-made catastrophe in the gulf does not yet constitute an existential threat to Mr. Obama’s presidency. (There’s not much Mr. Obama can do about it at this point, anyway, short of slapping on a scuba suit and sticking his hand in the pipe until the relief well is completed.) But then, it is never really one crisis that diminishes a president as much as a succession of crises, avoidable or not. And this might be the real danger for Mr. Obama’s administration — not that the spill itself remains unmanageable, but that it comes to represent a pattern in the public mind, a sense that too many dangers at once (mines and foreign economies collapsing, possible war on the Korean peninsula) seem to be gushing beyond his reach.
As much as we talk about ideology and competence, our judgment of presidents doesn’t hinge on either of these things in isolation. What matters is the perception — or perhaps the illusion — that one is shaping events, rather than being shaped by them. The modern presidency, like the old “Get Smart” series, is about chaos versus control.
Take, for instance, the cautionary tale of Jimmy Carter, whose presidency, it is often said, was felled by inflation, or maybe Iranian hostage-takers or gas shortages, depending on who is doing the eulogizing. In fact, inflation was probably at the core of Carter’s troubles. Those other misfortunes contributed, too.
(More here.)
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