CRASH: Obamic Leadership And Oil Don't Mix

The Obamic handling of the Gulf oil crisis is putting his many failings on vivid display, even as it highlights the incompetence and dishonesty of his people.

Nobody here is blaming Obama for the wild well.  Note that I'm not blaming anybody for the wild well, either.  That waits to be sorted out, and I have enough understanding of the drilling process to know that Kim-chi happens despite all people can do.

I DO blame environmental whackos...Obama among their enablers...for putting the process of drilling for America's oil in 5,000 feet of water, but that is not where the real, proximate blame lies for Obama.

I do not blame Obama for the failure to contain the wild well.  I don't blame anyone else for that either, figuring that everybody is doing what they can to bring the well under control. 

I DO blame Obama for rhetorical excesses throughout this ordeal.  But that isn't the worst thing he's guilty of doing.

No, I blame Barack Hussain Obama for his amazing and omnibus failures to lead in any meaningful sense of the term.  I blame him for the failure of mitigation in the Gulf.

"Plug the damn hole" is a stupid and petulant thing to say.  It was the opposite of leadership.  It reflects ignorance and arrogance.  It also is something the President Of The United States has no idea how to perform...or any control over, really. 

What the President has control over is a vast bureaucracy which includes immense resources.  He also has control...to a fair degree...of the miles of red tape Washington spools out over us in a never-ending stream.  He CAN cut that red tape in a time of crisis (real crisis, not that magic political crisis we know Obama so dearly loves).  Obama failed to use these two levers at his command.

Within a few days of the blow-out, we had offers from around the world by people who have faced similar oil discharges, and found innovative ways to deal with them.  Our bureaucrats muffed them.  We have had offers from people who knew ways to protect wet-lands, and our bureaucrats thanked them, and ignored them.

We know that miles of new boom material is being produced, stored, and sitting, and that innovation is waiting to be implemented...all because our bureaucrats are sitting on them.

And, we know that for callus political show-boating (i.e., "keeping a boot on their neck"), a whole essential industry has been derailed.  And we know that the Obamic head of the agency who did that lied about his scientific, technical basis for the action.  One trait of a leader is that they choose people of character and ability.  The Obama administration is populated with the most radical, least capable, and lowest caliber people in the U.S.  Integrity is a word nobody associates with Obama; yet it is an essential component of real leadership.

We know that the government of states directly effected by the oil have had plans they could not implement because of the overburden of Federal regulation, and that NOBODY connected with Obama saw to it that the weight was lifted to allow the states to act in the interest of their citizens.

When we are hoping people will think outside the box, and try new and maybe risky solutions, it is not leadership to talk loosely about "criminal inquiry".  There is NOTHING that will assure that people follow the safest POSSIBLE path than that, or that they will divert at least some of their thinking and resources to preventing some politician on a witch hunt from "kicking their ass".

Most Americans know executive ability when they see it in practice.  And most of us know when it just isn't there.  Not too surprisingly, many academics do not understand what it is, where it comes from, or even how it looks, despite studying the people who display it.

"There is a craving for a different kind of crisis leadership from President Obama largely because he's so capable of it as we saw on the campaign trail in 2008," presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said. "When he lets go and talks from the heart, he's one of the most effective political figures in modern times."

Leadership is not about "talking from the heart", though there is an element of that.  It is way past talking at all.  And, useful as it may be in a campaign, being a "most effective political figure" is of less than no use in a time of crisis.  Obama was a razor as a critic of others' leadership; that seems his sole talent in the area.