Is the spill Obama's Katrina, Frank Rich asks?
Whatever Obama’s failings, he is infinitely more competent at coping with catastrophe than his predecessor. President Bush’s top disaster managers — the Homeland Security secretary, Michael Chertoff, as well as the notorious “Brownie” — professed ignorance of New Orleans’s humanitarian crisis a full day after the nation had started watching it live in real time on television. When Bush finally appeared, he shunned the city entirely and instead made a jocular show of vowing to rebuild the coastal home of his party’s former Senate leader, Trent Lott. He never did take charge.
So, is the reaction to BP's massive spill really about governance, and whether Obama is an engaged, take charge leader.
[The Obama administration] was way too trusting of BP but was never AWOL. For all the second-guessing, it’s still not clear what else the president might have done to make a definitive, as opposed to cosmetic, difference in plugging the hole: yell louder at BP, send in troops and tankers, or, as James Carville would have it, assume the role of Big Daddy? The spill is not a Tennessee Williams play, its setting notwithstanding, and it’s hard to see what more drama would add, particularly since No Drama Obama’s considerable talents do not include credible play-acting.
Or is it about whether we want free enterprise as distinct from (and opposed to) Europe's alleged statism? Rand Paul (a comical candidate from the loony right) stands for that extraordinarily naive acceptance of a fairy-tale America with vision of "founding fathers" that never existed outside of third grade plays on President's Day.
The more revealing strand of Rand Paul’s post-primary victory romp may have been his musings about BP, not civil rights law — although they are two sides of the same ideological coin. He called out Obama and his administration for sounding “really un-American” in their “criticism of business.” He asked that we stop the “blame game” over the disaster and instead just accept the fact that “accidents happen.” Much as Paul questioned the federal government’s role in ordering lunch counters to desegregate, so he belittled its intrusion into BP’s toxic private enterprise. But unlike the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the role of government in corporate regulation is a continuing battle, not settled law.
...As The Economist, hardly a liberal observer, put it, Paul’s views are those of “a genuine radical who believes in paring government down to the bone.”
The president of the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank, codified the mission in apocalyptic terms last weekend. The new American “culture war,” Arthur C. Brooks wrote in The Washington Post, is not “over guns, gays or abortion” but pits “the principles of free enterprise” against the “European-style statism” he accuses Obama of fomenting. It’s a war that takes no prisoners: the A.E.I. purged the former Bush speechwriter David Frum after he broke with the strict party line.
The stakes are high. To win this culture war, the right must rewrite history — and not just that of the Bush response to Katrina.
In this blog we are more realistic about America's form of free enterprise. Over here, we call it "free" enterprise with big quotation marks. What a century of "free enterprise" brought us -- in the Gulf, in the oil wars in the Middle East, in decades of decisions that gave into oil interests and decimated the wetlands that would have kept New Orleans safe from tidal surges, in what happened to the banks -- isn't freedom and it will continue to cost us far more than real freedom would.
While the nutcases like Paul, about 35 sitting senators, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and many Tea Partiers continue to foam at the mouth, some conservatives are looking away. Real conservatives' interests extend beyond personal power and profit. They know the worth of effective central government. For them and for many of us Obama was slow off the mark. He lost some high ground.
As Frank Rich warns, "there’s the nagging fear that the largest oil spill in our history could yet prove worse if it drags on much longer. It might not only wreck the ecology of a region but capsize the principal mission of the Obama presidency."The only good news from the oil spill is that when catastrophe strikes, even some hard-line conservatives, like Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, start begging for the federal government to act, and act big. It’s the crunch moment for government to make its case — as Obama belatedly started to do on Thursday. But words are no match for results. As long as the stain washes up on shore, the hole in BP’s pipe will serve the right as a gaping hole in the president’s argument for expanded government supervision of, for starters, Big Oil and big banks. It’s not just the gulf that could suffer for decades to come.
