Gotham Diary:
Woolly
One of my homiest maxims is that being ahead of the times is just another way of being wrong. You don’t get any points for seeing what’s coming if you can’t persuade anybody else that you’re right. And since almost everything that we see coming involves a shout or two of “Repent!”, it’s no wonder that nobody wants to listen.
But I’m going to venture one of my ahead-of-things ideas anyway. Having read well over six hundred feeds this afternoon alone, I feel moderately comfortable with the claim that “nobody is talking about this.” All that means, though, is that nobody is talking about what I mean to propose in my little corner of the Blogosphere. If you’ve run into this idea somewhere else, please write to me and let me know.
What I’m wondering is why President Obama hasn’t nationalized the Deepwater Horizon problem. Just the one catastrophic well, not British Petroleum! Why is he waiting for the BP people to come up with a plan, when, nearly two months into the disaster, that’s precisely what they’ve so signally failed to do. Does he believe that American voters, most of whom understand embarrassingly little about the complexities of the problem — and I’m talking about the complexities that surround the difficulty of fixing it, not the headache of actually sealing the well itself — does President Obama believe that Americans are going to be reassured by talk of making sure that BP pays for the cleanup?
Until the weekend before last, I was saying that I’d like Deepwater to be placed under military control, if only the military knew how to deal with messes like Deepwater. Then Deborah Solomon asked Christopher Brownfield, a retired submarine captain, what could be done, and it suddenly seemed as though only the military knows what to do about Deepwater. How to seal it by blowing it up, that is. And not with nuclear weapons, either.
Why hasn’t that been done?
I’m very skeptical about why we haven’t done it. I think the reason is that when the oil companies are in charge of bringing the solutions to the table, they are going to advocate solutions that allow them to continue recovering the oil.
The answer to my “why not?” question is, I’m increasingly convinced, that President Obama is a meritocrat, somebody who tested well into the elite and who, ipso facto, is largely happy with the world as it is, because he has, qua meritocrat, been rewarded for understanding how it works. Why would he want to change the game? I don’t mean to sound a note of cynicism; I believe that Barack Obama quite sincerely has the best interests of the United States at heart, and that he would do anything that he could think of to solve its problems. The catch is that there are too many things that he can’t think of, because if he’d allowed himself to be distracted by them on his laudable climb up the ladder — to achieve an honor that will probably shine brighter if he serves just the one term, that of being the nation’s first president of color — he’d never have made it to the top.
So, when the president summons bankers and oilmen to the Oval Office, what he sees is other guys who have tested well, just like him. He’s doing his job; why can’t they? (There is simply no other explanation for his countenancing the presence of the odious Lawrence Summers.)
The president that I wish Mr Obama would model himself upon is not FDR — for a thousand reasons, not the least of which is that the president who succeeded FDR was every bit as important, but also a thousand times more down-to-earth. Harry Truman assumed that the fast-talking experts who paraded through his office were trying in one way or another to pull the wool over his eyes, and, as an accomplished haberdasher, he had an eye for wool. In the history of the Twentieth Century White House, Harry Truman’s firing of the bellicose Douglas McArthur is sadly unparalleled. But there’s still time for Barack Obama to give it a Twenty-First Century try.