Whatever happened to the fierce urgency of now?
Since becoming President, Barack Obama has been a study in self-control. No irritant can get a rise out of him. Not the underwear bomber. Not Goldman Sachs. Not even BP.
Perhaps the President should reread the Martin Luther King speech from which he borrowed the second-best line of his campaign (the first being "Yes We Can"). Reminding Americans of the "fierce urgency of now," Rev. King added: "This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off."
Americans have been horrified by the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, a scene they have been able to watch night and day thanks to the "spillcam," whose live footage BP was eventually forced - by Massachusetts congressman Ed Markey, not Mr. Obama, mind you - to make public.
As the President dismissed "those who think we were either slow on the response [to the spill]or lacked urgency" during his hour-long press conference on Thursday, cable channels that covered the event also had a live view of the spewing oil in the bottom corner of the screen.
Since the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, Mr. Obama has shown only the occasional flourish of emotion. But mostly, in the 40 days since this horror began, he has simply delivered business-like updates of his administration's increasingly questionable handling of what has become the worst oil spill in U.S. history and possibly the country's biggest environmental disaster.
On Friday, Mr. Obama travelled to the Gulf for the second time since the accident to witness the devastation as oil the consistency of chocolate pudding seeped onto the shores and into the precious Louisiana marshes. His neat khakis and cleanly pressed shirt didn't quite cut it. Couldn't his handlers have at least dressed him in hip waders or something?
"If Bill Clinton was President, he'd have been in a wet suit trying to get down to see the spill," Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell cracked.
The last thing anyone wants is another inauthentic politician who swears he feels your pain. To his credit, Mr. Obama comes off as more sincere than most, better briefed than his briefers, and clearly in command of his administration. But presidents must also be good communicators and Mr. Obama, to the surprise of almost everyone who witnessed his 2008 campaign performance, has struggled with his messaging.
Sometimes the even-keel approach just looks robotic.
"The President is somebody who has navigated the racial divide in America by being a mediator. He's a diplomat at heart," Rice University presidential historian Douglas Brinkley offered in an interview. "It's certainly a noble instinct. But not everything is a mediation. Look, when a building's on fire, scream 'fire.' "
The administration's errors in dealing with the spill fall into two categories. The first involves confidence; the second, judgment.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's rote response that the administration has kept its "boot on the neck" of BP belies reality. It was only on Thursday that the government was able to estimate the actual spill flow - anywhere from 12,000 to 19,000 barrels of oil a day - after BP insisted for weeks that it hovered around 5,000 barrels.
On Thursday afternoon, Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the man Mr. Obama put in charge of the spill response effort, appeared on U.S. networks affirming that BP's "top kill" attempt to cap the leak was proceeding as planned. Only later was it disclosed that BP had, in fact, suspended the operation the night before. (It has since resumed.)
The White House displayed characteristic tone-deafness in allowing Mr. Obama to headline a trio of high-priced fundraisers in California on Tuesday, including one at the home of billionaire oil heir Gordon Getty. It was only after it took flak for that trip that the White House hastily organized another to the Gulf.
Republicans have not let this opportunity pass. The party's senatorial committee has produced a video juxtaposing candidate Obama's criticism of the Bush administration's handling of the aftermath to Hurricane Katrina - in which Mr. Obama decries Mr. Bush's "half-hearted leadership" and vows "never again" - against this administration's own foibles.
But it is the disavowal of the President by his own "friends" that has been most devastating. Former Clinton aide James Carville's irate outbursts have been running in a loop on cable news: "It just looks like he's not involved in this. Man, you've got to get down here and take control of this. … We're about to die down here."
Louisiana Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu was almost as caustic. "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," she told Politico. To paraphrase Rev. King, it could be fatal for the President to overlook the urgency of this moment.