Today’s Opinion page in the Plain
Dealer delivers a piece by Edward Wasserman, a newspaper editor and journalism
professor, rife with complaints about President Obama receiving blame for the
response to the continuing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Well, alright, he isn’t exactly complaining
about Obama getting blamed for the response, but rather, the initial spill
itself. Details being the inconvenient
things that they sometimes are, it is in this point that Mr. Wasserman’s argument
dissolves.
Among the targets of Wasserman’s contempt is Peggy Noonan, opinion columnist for the Wall Street Journal, who on May 29, 2010 published an opinion piece, titled “He [Obama] Was Supposed to be Competent.” The entire point of the article, which Wasserman either completely missed or consciously chose to ignore is that President Obama’s administration (at that point) had spent 40 days attempting to feign ignorance of anything happening in the Gulf, in the hopes that a shocked public would lay blame for the catastrophe solely at the feet of British Petroleum. Nowhere in this article, nor in any other cited by Wasserman, is President Obama being accused of causing the initial spill itself. Many people are critical of the lackadaisical oversight of drilling operations that led to the disaster, both by BP and the federal government, but those are problems that predate President Obama’s inauguration, and fair minded people understand that.
In Mr. Wasserman’s mind, it is unfair that a president he so admires be subject to the political realities that everyone else in his position has been, and will be again. Was it fair that George W. Bush received all of the blame for the slow response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005? Of course it wasn’t, just as it wasn’t fair that Mayor Nagin didn’t receive the level of criticism that he deserved for epically botching the evacuation of New Orleans in the days leading up to the storm. It wasn’t fair that then-Governor Kathleen Blanco didn’t receive the same kind of outrage that President Bush did for waiting until after the hurricane had passed to declare a state of emergency, allowing the federal government to legally act.
People like Wasserman are easily hoisted on their own intellectual petard. So blinded by his holier-than-thou belief in his own moral superiority and his insistence that Barack Obama shares is moral clarity and intellectual prowess, he not only gets the argument wrong, but more importantly forgets that history has a way of repeating itself. The lesson to be learned in how journalists are interpreting the response of the Obama administration to this disaster has little if anything to do with the predictability of the news media – Republican or Democrat, if you are president when a crisis this massive happens and you don’t handle it properly, you are going to be pilloried by the press. The lesson instead is the same as it was in August of 2005, as Noonan herself observes in her aforementioned opinion piece: “When you ask a government far away in Washington to handle everything, it will handle nothing well.”
And just for a laugh, check out how BP handles a different kind of spill.
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