What's Wrong with Obama

First, there is a lot that is right about Obama. Unlike Bush, Obama isn't simply seeking to cut the taxes of the rich. Obama did finally push through a modest health care reform bill. But...

Like show business, nobody is interested in yesterday's hits. They are asking "what are you doing for me today?". And Obama is falling down on delivering a solution to the Gulf oil spill. Here's a bit from a posting by David R. Kotok, a Wall Street financial type -- yuck! -- but he is saying something that needs to be heard:

Our national leader faces huge and growing disapproval and repudiation by his core constituency. “Whose ass to kick” was supposed to be a demonstration of toughness. It backfired. Harvard lawyer and Chicago politician Obama is a skilled orator and chooses every word carefully. This phrase was selected by him to convey some type of forceful political nuance. It failed because it showed Obama out-of-character and therefore suggested that he is a politician first and leader second.

The timeline of events starting with April 20 shows that the White House and the Obama administration had conflicting contingency plans and were disorganized. On April 22, the day the rig sank, President Obama, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano, Interior Secretary Salazar and others did not know there was a leak. They were in an emergency meeting together in the Oval Office and were operating without good information. That is understandable. What is not comprehensible is why it took them so long to realize the seriousness of their ignorance.

It took Coast Guard Admiral Allen to wake them up. On April 24, Obama’s staff was told there was a meaningful spill. On April 28, the White House finally accepted that it was big.

The president made his first trip to the Gulf a week later and two weeks after the rig explosion. And he did not immediately activate sufficient federal resources to the level we now know was needed even when briefed by Admiral Allen and Governor Jindal. That is why Obama is being compared to George Bush and Katrina when the public evaluates the response to crisis.

Kotok points to some unexpected "damage" that Obama's decision to put a moratorium on offshore wells has created:

We now add the Alaska pipeline as a possible casualty, because of insufficient throughput due to the shutdown of existing drilling thousands of miles from the Gulf. The pipeline is built for 2 million barrels a day capacity. It currently carries about 700,000 which is near the minimum necessary to operate. It is supplied by oil drilled offshore. If it doesn’t maintain sufficient volume of warm oil the oil will cool and congeal. Five existing offshore wells that would keep the volume sufficient are now affected by the Obama moratorium.

We estimate that an extended moratorium, which we now expect to continue because of Obama political calculus, will cost up to 200,000 higher-paying jobs in the oil drilling and oil service business and that the employment multiplier of 4.7 will put the total job loss at nearly 1 million permanent employment shrinkage occurring over the next few years. Five states have a regional recession/depression development underway. Alaska could become the sixth state on the damaged list.

My response to the above? Obama should recognize the motto of the medical profession: "First and above all, do no harm." The Gulf oil spill is a disaster, but moves that compound the disaster in a vague "precautionary" reflex is silly and expensive. Kotok has pointed out how a decision from an event in the Gulf has consequences many thousands of miles away in Alaska.