Rich is a bit too kind and diplomatic, but the headline doesn't pull any punches: as bad as Bush's response to Katrina was, it was consistent with conservatives small-government-and-let-your-cronies-pull-the-fillings-from-the-dead-and-sell-them-philosophy.
We elected Obama as a repudiation of that philosophy, but instead he has been too quick to trust big business and accept their token concessions rather than publicly humble them and neuter their ability to harm us--tongue-lashings not followed up by quick action instead of slow, toothless, and easy to ignore bipartisan commissions are no substitute.
What Rich didn't pull his punches on is conservatives and their big business owners are playing a take no prisoners, no compromise game. They want all the marbles, and Obama's constant talk of seeking consensus and their input makes it look like conservative ideas are the only ones available and Democrats must come begging to borrow a cup or they can't figure out how to govern.
Clearly, Obama and Rahm have a strategery behind the bipartisan drivel: peel off the last few moderate Republicans and get them to switch parties, and make the Democrats the go-to corporate party that gets the majority of voters, but then only asks businesses how much reform they would consent to instead of telling them how things are going to be.
Obama was elected as a progressive antidote to this discredited brand of governance. Of all the president’s stated goals, none may be more sweeping than his desire to prove that government is not always a hapless and intrusive bureaucratic assault on taxpayers’ patience and pocketbooks, but a potential force for good.
He returned to this theme with particular eloquence in his University of Michigan commencement speech 10 days after the Deepwater Horizon blowout. He reminded his audience that under both parties the federal government helped build public high schools, the transcontinental railroad and the interstate highway system, engineered the New Deal and Medicare — and imposed safety and environmental standards on the oil industry. Quoting Lincoln, Obama said that “the role of government is to do for the people what they cannot do better for themselves.”
We expect him to deliver on this core conviction. But the impact on “the people” of his signature governmental project so far, health care reform, remains provisional and abstract. Like it or not, a pipe gushing poison into an ocean is a visceral crisis demanding visible, immediate action.
Obama’s news conference on Thursday — explaining in detail the government’s response, its mistakes and its precise relationship to BP — was at least three weeks overdue. It was also his first full news conference in 10 months. Obama’s recurrent tardiness in defining exactly what he wants done on a given issue — a lapse also evident in the protracted rollout of the White House’s specific health care priorities — remains baffling, as does his recent avoidance of news conferences. Such diffidence does not convey a J.F.K.-redux in charge of a neo-New Frontier activist government.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/opinion/30rich.html?hp|FULL TEXT>
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