If You're Losing Frank Rich...

A second consecutive Obama-basher from Frank Rich.  And unlike last week, this one does not even pivot to Palin-bashing in order to reassure Times readers about the real evils in the world.

IT turns out there is something harder to find than a fix for BP’s leak: Barack Obama’s boiling point.

The frantic and fruitless nationwide search for the president’s temper is now our sole dependable comic relief from the tragedy in the gulf.

Rich then explains that our professorial Prez has too much faith in experts and meetings.  Who could have guessed?

We still want to believe that Obama is on our side, willing to fight those bad corporate actors who cut corners and gambled recklessly while regulators slept, Congress raked in contributions, and we got stuck with the wreckage and the bills. But his leadership style keeps sowing confusion about his loyalties, puncturing holes in the powerful tale he could tell.

His most conspicuous flaw is his unshakeable confidence in the collective management brilliance of the best and the brightest he selected for his White House team — “his abiding faith in the judgment of experts,” as Joshua Green of The Atlantic has put it. At his gulf-centric press conference 10 days ago, the president said he had “probably had more meetings on this issue than just about any issue since we did our Afghan review.” This was meant to be reassuring but it was not. The plugging of an uncontrollable oil leak, like the pacification of an intractable Afghanistan, may be beyond the reach of marathon brainstorming by brainiacs, even if the energy secretary is a Nobel laureate. Obama has yet to find a sensible middle course between blind faith in his own Ivy League kind and his predecessor’s go-with-the-gut bravado.

One of Obama's few job-related skills is his ability to run a meeting in which a wide variety of viewpoints are aired and a consensus is forged.  Unfortunately, one might worry that his typical experience is in forging a consensus related to relatively abstract ideas.  Bringing a Harvard Law Review meeting together on some legal question (e.g., capital punishment) is ultimately a matter of exposing the participants to a range of facts and opinions in order to change minds.  If views are fairly aired, people's minds are changed, and people who once disagreed leave in agreement then the meeting is a success. 

However, problems like the Gulf oil well are impervious to Obama's well-formed opinions and judgments, and physical reality takes over.  The consensus answer to capping a leaking well is irrelevant - what counts is the right answer.  Good meeting management skills will still be helpful, but there are important differences. 

Back to Rich:

By now, he also should have learned that the best and the brightest can get it wrong — and do. His economic advisers predicted that without the stimulus the unemployment rate might reach 9 percent — a projection that was quickly exceeded even with the stimulus and that has haunted the administration ever since. Other White House geniuses persuaded the president to make his fateful claim in early April that “oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills” — a particularly specious (indeed false) plank in the argument for his spectacularly ill-timed expansion of offshore oil drilling. The Times reported last week that at the administration meetings leading to this new drilling policy the subject of the vast dysfunction at the Minerals Management Service, the agency charged with regulating the drilling, never even came up.

Ouch.  Where were the meeting management skills then?  And a bit more:

Obama’s excessive trust in his own heady team is all too often matched by his inherent deference to the smartest guys in the boardroom in the private sector.

Obama trusted BP and he trusted Goldman Sachs, but, per Rich, Obama needs to save his Presidency by becoming a new Teddy Roosevelt, bashing Big Business at every opportunity.  Yeah, that will restore business confidence and create jobs.

Comments

[Danube of Thought]

My father at one point commanded Cruiser-Destoryer Flotilla Two, and it would have been unwise in the extreme to consider it a rag-tag underdog outfit.

This was at a time when the US ruled, and I mean ruled, the waves.

[Melinda Romanoff]

Rick-

I think the inventory build is still going on, so it will be positive, but hollow.

I have a file dump for you, in between boxes, but it will come from an addy that can ship big loads. I will e-mail in advance the new addy to expect. It's the last 92 pages of the Reinhart/Rogoff book in a slide show.

Get some rest from your move, I'm going to calm down from the Hawks win and negotiate with my brother about seeing the game in Philly.

I'm fading, so have a good night, all.

[narciso]

All right, point taken DoT, but I don't think
they intended it in that sense

[Rick Ballard]

Mel,

Q2 will be weakly positive, Q3 will be "Order? What orders?". If it weren't for big USG fleet buys the Govmo zombie would be shedding limbs and current new housing sales have expired right along with the tax break. Local and state governments are going to have to shed employees like autumn leaves within weeks or risk their bond ratings.

The Dem Job Killers didn't let a crisis go to waste - they just exacerbated it to the point of guaranteeing very significant losses in November.

[Melinda Romanoff]

DrJ-

I agree, but I think what was being referred to is a mechanic. And we have seen them in the lab, particularly someone like George Rathmann (although if he had a dog named "Magic", I've thrown off his train of thought more than once.").

Just a matter of perspective, in my opinion, a blunt statement by someone, and a sensitive response.

Each taken seriously.

And precisely why we come back here and learn from each other.

And now I really have to go, but I feel better, not just by the Hawks HUGE win.

G'night all.

[Melinda Romanoff]

Rick-
Q3 is shipping now, and I know it is through a client. I"m not looking past that right now.

G'night all.

[DrJ]

MR,

I think what was being referred to is a mechanic. And we have seen them in the lab, particularly someone like George Rathmann

Rathmann has created more wealth than anyone I know personally. Yes, there are lab techs who do their rote work. But I take exception to those who claim, in any form, that lab work is divorced from reality. Lab work is an integral part of wealth creation, and that requires good and timely decisions to be made every time. And it has been done time and time again to create companies that have built the technology base of our country.

I reject absolutely the concept that one has to be in the field, or be an engineer (though that is my training) to be able to make good decisions. This is abject nonsense, and any such statements deserve to be derided as I am doing now.

Pfui.

[Charlie (Colorado)]

Charlie, no offense intended. Have you ever hung out with the theoretical chemists or biologists? Quite a different sort that straight CS, even those active in one of those fields.

Oh, none taken, I'm just teasing you. But having spent a good bit of time trying to make something of the intuition that there's a connection between D'arcy Thompson's morphological transformations and information-theoretic limits on gene expression, I'm not sure I don't still end up in the same category.

[Patrick]

"Barack Obama’s boiling point."

His boiling point is another liberal distraction. Frank Rich the critic wants narrative and theatre. What we NEED is a President who isnt a post turtle, who actually can marshall resources to SOLVE problems instead of pointing blame or talking about them.

"I'd take any random first-line engineering manager over Obama in a situation requiring a real solution. The only problem Obama has ever managed was how to take out an opposing candidate. "

YUP ... don't send a lawyer to do an engineer's job.