On the Gulf Course

Headlines:

One day in the timeline:

April 26: A remote sub fails to stop the leak. Just four days after the explosion, the spill covers an area the size of Rhode Island. After hosting a ceremony for the New York Yankees, Obama travels to Andrews Air Force Base for a game of golf.

Mary Landrieu: President Obama will pay politically for spill

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) said Thursday that President Barack Obama will pay a political price for his lack of visibility in the Gulf region during the catastrophic BP oil spill.

“The president has not been as visible as he should have been on this, and he’s going to pay a political price for it, unfortunately,” Landrieu told POLITICO.

Peggy Noonan explains why this is not a good thing, no matter whether you support or oppose the president.

The disaster in the Gulf may well spell the political end of the president and his administration, and that is no cause for joy. It's not good to have a president in this position—weakened, polarizing and lacking broad public support—less than halfway through his term. That it is his fault is no comfort. It is not good for the stability of the world, or its safety, that the leader of "the indispensable nation" be so weakened. I never until the past 10 years understood the almost moral imperative that an American president maintain a high standing in the eyes of his countrymen.

Iran. North Korea. China. Russia. Turkey. Pakistan. Trust works two ways - both with allies and enemies or potential enemies. Analysts and leaders of both sets are watching Obama and wondering the same thing: as a management problem,  the oil spill is relatively straightforward and he could not manage it. So is he competent to lead during a immeasurably more complex and pressing crisis involving one or more of them? After all, there is no "other side" in the spill. The well has no will of its own and does not react to BP's or the government' actions. It just leaks.

But, as Clausewitz emphasized 185 years ago, one's enemy does not merely act, it reacts also. Or as we used to put it when I was still on active duty, "The enemy gets a vote." Or more accurately, a veto or its attempt. Around the globe, this administration has been vetoed at almost every turn. Iran? Vetoed there and at the UN. Vetoed by Russia and China. Vetoed, for that matter, by England and other European countries, whose support for American initiatives have been tepid at best.

Our allies' leaders seem to see little reason to stake their governments, their treasuries and their domestic standing on this president's competence or, for that matter, on his will to fight a long fight and overcome blockades and obstacles. Obama did not demonstrate any such thing in his campaign's signature issue, health care reform. He was absent from the framing of the legislation, outsourcing it to Pelosi and Reid. He crossed no aisles, incorporated no Republican ideas and got no Republican votes.

In fact, when the president went to the Hill to meet with Senate Republicans, he apparently went with not to build bridges with them but to tear down what little abutments there were left.

President Obama went to Capitol Hill on Tuesday for a rare meeting with Senate Republicans, but the 75-minute session yielded little progress on hot-button topics and left some senators with bruised feelings. ...

"He needs to take a Valium before he comes in and talks to Republicans," Sen. Pat Roberts (Kan.) told reporters. "He's pretty thin-skinned."

Sen. Sam Brownback (Kan.) described the meeting as "testy," and Sen. John Thune (S.D.) called it a "lively discussion." Others questioned whether the "symbolism" of Obama's approach matched the actions of his Democratic congressional allies. ...

But his spokesman Robert Gibbs acknowledged that little agreement was reached.

"Bipartisan" to Obama means that the Republicans vote the way he wants. What does this say to Britain, France, Japan, Germany, or for that matter to Iran, Russia or China? It says political ineptitude and inability or lack of desire either to form or to work with a coalition. They are likely concluding the same thing as Sen. John McCain did after the Senate meeting, "There are legitimate questions as to whether he’s out of his depth or not."

Of course, Republicans who come to this conclusion are free to say so. A lot of Democrats will (or have) come to the same conclusion but cannot say so. Either way, the thought is more important than its utterance. Increasingly, the president will find it harder to gain rock-solid support on the Hill for his programs. Not even his own party's members will have his back. In fact, many Democrat members are starting to run against him as much as their Republican opponent. Even in an overseas crisis, the president will discover that the well of trust and confidence in him has already run pretty dry among Democrats. And as Noonan explains, this is not a good thing.

The oil spill is important not just ecologically but because it illuminates the Obama syndrome: the physical and emotional and managerial absence of the president. There is nothing in Obama's resume that shows he ever made highly difficult decisions that depended, at the end, on his own personal reservoir of wisdom and experience. So he does not tackle the inbox because its contents are above his competence. (One is reminded of Obama telling Rick Warren that when an unborn child gets human rights is "above my pay grade.") He tends instead to lesser matters that match his lower level of competence and protect his ego. Noonan again:

The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. ...

The original sin in my view is that as soon as the oil rig accident happened the president tried to maintain distance between the gusher and his presidency. He wanted people to associate the disaster with BP and not him. When your most creative thoughts in the middle of a disaster revolve around protecting your position, you are summoning trouble.

As Glenn Reynolds observed during an earlier administration failure, when its PR effort "is to change which of your failures is the subject of conversation, it’s not a great sign."

So if North and South Korea come to open combat will that be Obama's first impulse, to maintain distance between the crisis and him personally? Shall we be admonished, as we have on so many other issues, that the previous administration left him a mess of things?

Besides allies and opponents, there are fence sitters. They are watching, too, to determine whether the United States shall be the strong horse in world affairs. So far, every sign is that this administration it simply is not interested. Charles Krauthammer sees something even more ominous than disinterest: actual intention. Iran's new alignment with Turkey and Brazil is,

... a crushing verdict on the Obama foreign policy. It demonstrates how rising powers, traditional American allies, having watched this administration in action, have decided that there's no cost in lining up with America's enemies and no profit in lining up with a U.S. president given to apologies and appeasement. ...

This is not just an America in decline. This is an America in retreat -- accepting, ratifying and declaring its decline, and inviting rising powers to fill the vacuum.

Nor is this retreat by inadvertence. This is retreat by design and, indeed, on principle. It's the perfect fulfillment of Obama's adopted Third World narrative of American misdeeds, disrespect and domination from which he has come to redeem us and the world. Hence his foundational declaration at the U.N. General Assembly last September that "No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation" (guess who's been the dominant nation for the last two decades?) and his dismissal of any "world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another." (NATO? The West?).

Richard Cohen wrote last fall that "Obama Doesn't Seem Ready to Lead."

This is the president we now have: He inspires lots of affection but not a lot of awe. It is the latter, though, that matters most in international affairs, where the greatest and most gut-wrenching tests await Obama.

The world is becoming more dangerous because of this administration, not less. But don't worry, just play another round of golf and everything will be all right.

Updates: Peter Wehner:

The president's instincts are by now obvious to all: deflect blame, point fingers, and lash out at others, most especially his predecessor. We know from press reports (see here and here) that the strategy for the Democrats in 2010, two years after Obama was elected president, is to – you guessed it – blame George W. Bush.

I guess this was inevitable: Pelosi blames Bush for the oil spill. People, read this - you just can't make stuff like this up.