Matt Steinglass reins in his temper better than me today and writes lucidly about the moronic critiques of Barack Obama’s emotional response to the BP oil spill, culminating in Maureen Dowd’s angst this weekend over Obama’s “inability to encapsulate Americans’ feelings”:
Ms Dowd’s involvement is fitting, as this may be the sorriest spectacle of content-free public hyperventilation since Al Gore’s earth tones. The difference is that in this case the issue is deadly serious; it’s the public discourse that is puerile. There is plenty of room for substantive critique of the flaws in governance and policy uncovered by the Deepwater Horizon blowout. You could talk about regulatory failure. You could talk about corporate impunity. You could talk about blithely ignoring the tail-end risk of going ahead with deepwater drilling without any capacity to cope with catastrophic blowouts. Precisely none of these subjects are evident in the arguments our pundit class is having. Instead we have empty-headed squawking over what the catastrophe is doing to Barack Obama’s image.
Look: no one knows how to stop this spill. It’s not a matter of effort, it’s a matter of the current state of human knowledge. As Matt says, the substantive critiques are fine (Obama should shut down all offshore drilling, he should send more workers to clean up the shore, he should use this as an opportunity to talk about clean energy, etc.), but witless griping about Obama’s emotion level or his need to “take charge” is just dumb. Knock it off, everyone.
