Frank Rich needs more wrath from his president, too.
It turns out there is something harder to find than a fix for BP’s leak: Barack Obama’s boiling point. ...Only The Onion could have imagined the White House briefing last week where a CBS News correspondent asked the press secretary, Robert Gibbs, if he had “really seen rage from the president” and to “describe it.” Gibbs came up with Obama’s “clenched jaw” and his order to “plug the damn hole.” (Thank God he hadn’t settled for “darn.”)
The trouble is, it's not just funny. Rich sees "serious doubts" about the president's leadership. For a start the president has too much confidence in his team. He doesn't reassure us with the number of meetings he's had or his admiration for crime kings like Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein.
Rich himself seems a little over-influenced by well-orchestrated media jabs at Obama. Even so, he's exactly right here:
It’s this misplaced trust in elites both outside the White House and within it that seems to prevent Obama from realizing the moment that history has handed to him. Americans are still seething at the bonus-grabbing titans of the bubble and at the public and private institutions that failed to police them. But rather than embrace a unifying vision that could ignite his presidency, Obama shies away from connecting the dots as forcefully and relentlessly as the facts and Americans’ anger demand.
Eliot Ness didn't hold back from pursuing Frank Nitti and Al Capone just because they understood the architecture of their criminality better than he did. He pursued them and he outfoxed them. He played it straight. Somehow criminality in financial and corporate circles is "better" than on the Chicago streets?
Obama's trust in self-described "experts" (Rich and others call them "elites") is what we've been asked to tolerate in the same way we were expected to trust Bush and Cheney's secrecy and criminality. Does Obama really believe his measured tolerance of reckless behaviors is acceptable?
BP’s recklessness is just the latest variation on a story we know by heart. The company’s heedless disregard of risk and lack of safeguards at Deepwater Horizon are all too reminiscent of the failures at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and A.I.G., where the richly rewarded top executives often didn’t even understand the toxic financial products that would pollute and nearly topple the nation’s economy. BP’s reliance on bought-off politicians and lax, industry-captured regulators at the M.M.S. mirrors Wall Street’s cozy relationship with its indulgent overseers at the S.E.C., Federal Reserve and New York Fed — not to mention Massey Energy’s dependence on somnolent supervision from the Mine Safety and Health Administration.
Given Toyota’s recent game of Russian roulette with Americans’ safety and Anthem Blue Cross’s unconscionable insurance-rate increases in California, Obama shouldn’t have any problem riveting the country’s attention to this sorry saga. He has the field to himself, thanks to a political opposition whose hottest new star, Rand Paul, and most beloved gulf-state governor, Haley Barbour of Mississippi, both leapt to BP’s defense right after the rig exploded. The Wall Street Journal editorial page perfectly set forth the conservative establishment’s party line on May 26: “There is zero evidence so far that this blowout resulted from lax regulation or shoddy practices.” Or as BP’s Hayward asked indignantly, “What the hell did we do to deserve this?”
At what point will the Obama administration turn this situation around, giving us the badly needed, determined Teddy Roosevelt reform we so badly need?
Obama can’t embrace his inner T.R. as long as he’s too in thrall to the supposed wisdom of the nation’s meritocracy, too willing to settle for incremental pragmatism as a goal, and too inhibited by the fine points of Washington policy debates to embrace bold words and bold action. If he is to wield the big stick of reform against BP and the other powerful interests that have ripped us off, he will have to tell the big story with no holds barred.
That's the story we want to hear.
President Obama has the opportunity and the strength to lead us through the change he himself has advocated. Let's get on with it. We want to pull back from the edge now. "Reform" only begins to describe the plot of the story we want to hear from this president.
