Beyond Petroleum

Like most of America, I had something better to do with my time last night than watch Barack Obama's flailing Oval Office address.

A few masochists tuned in to watch the President attempt to spin or explain the failure of his administration to provide anything like leadership on day 57 of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It did not go well.

Even his most sycophantic apologists—Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann—ripped the President. Olbermann said, "It was a great speech if you were on another planet for the last 57 days." Matthews compared Obama to the most ineffective President of the 20th century, Jimmy Carter. Even faithful toady Eugene Robinson was forced to admit it was a failure.

Though his supporters are not yet ready to admit it, Obama's utter inability to lead is symptomatic of America's greatest ever experiment with the Peter Principle.

Barack Obama wasn't completely horrible at community organizing, and so became a state senator. He wasn't completely incompetent at that (even though he was laughed at by his peers on more than one occasion), and became a candidate for U.S. senator. He won his race because his original Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, was even more incompetent, and had to withdraw from the race he would have easily won because of a sex scandal. Obama was a completely unmemorable and undistinguished U.S. senator, and won the Presidency because his Democratic primary opponents and Republican doormat of a challenger were even more incompetent than he was. Oh... and because he promised "change."

Well, we asked for change, and we got it.

Like them or loathe them, All the previous Presidents of my lifetime (with the exception of Carter) have been able to project a veneer of competence in the Oval Office. I haven't always agreed with them and was sometimes outraged by their positions, but be they Democrat or Republican, I never doubted that they were leaders.

There is no leadership available to be harvested in the character of Barack Obama. He is from time-to-time a brilliant orator. He can excite a crowd and inspire them. He has the capacity, when he has the inspiration, to be a great cheerleader for a cause. But with every photo-opportunity, tightly choreographed public appearance, and perplexing hesitancy to act, more and more Americans are awakening to the horrifying fact that the man we elected to lead our nation for four years does not have it within his character to lead anything.

Sadly, we did this to him, and to our nation.

At no point in his life had Barack Obama ever show signs of competent executive experience. The one attempt he made to lead prior to the Presidency was an experimental school program that ended in abject failure after wasting tens of millions of dollars. Was it really fair of the American people to expect for him to succeed at the most important executive position on this planet with no prior experience of note on record?

Granted, the fault does not lie entirely with us.

The same ideological cheerleaders and pundits in the media that are now tearing down Barack Obama can only do so because they built him up and sold him to the American people in the first place. They created him not because of who he was or what he could do, but because of the opportunity he represented for them to feel better about themselves. The media created the myth of Barack Obama and protected their creation fiercely. They savaged or silenced those who asked inconvenient questions about his qualifications and experience, or utterly ignored to entertain the possibility that he was anything less than their progressive messiah.

Poor Barack Obama.

His erstwhile allies built him up to impossible heights, feeding his already substantial ego, telling him he was not just the best man for the job, but perhaps the best man for the job in recent memory. How easily that construct collapses. A hole a mile below the seafloor billowing oil has corrupted both the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the carefully crafted illusion of the President's competency as a leader.

Soon the same new critics of the President will "discover" that the man they supported for so long and who has failed as a leader during this environmental disaster has failed to deliver on his other promises as well. He has pushed his allies for a radical agenda but not put his own neck on the line for them, meaning they absorb the brunt of the public's ire, threatening the Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. Obama has adopted many of the practical policies of his predecessor that the media spent eight years attempting to destroy, forcing them into uncomfortable and hypocritical silences.

The media made him by sheltering Barack Obama and creating a towering myth around him, but such appreciative mythology does not come without expectations, or a price. Out of a sense of self preservation his biggest champions are well on their way to becoming Barack Obama's greatest critics.

They have now begun pointing out the inadequacies of his Administration and his failures of leadership in dealing with the complexities of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

There will be no lower limit to his fall from grace once the media and his other Democratic allies reveal that his incompetence ranges far beyond just this one disaster.