See, I have to deal with this all of the time in the issues about which I engage. Too often, we don’t judge the wisdom of policies by their impact or their propriety, but how those affected make us “feel.” And now President Obama is being criticized for his handling of the Gulf oil spill—for not showing enough emotion. From today’s column by Maureen Dowd, “A Story Teller Loses the Story Line:”
Reporters grilled Robert Gibbs at his White House briefing on Tuesday about the president’s strange inability to convey passion over a historical environmental disaster. This was underscored by Obama’s perfunctory drop-by to a sanitized beach in Grand Isle, La. Despite his recent ode about growing up near an ocean, he didn’t bother to meet with the regular folks who have lost their seafaring livelihoods. After Gibbs asserted that his boss was “enraged” at BP, CBS News’s Chip Reid skeptically pressed: “Have we really seen rage from the president on this? I think most people would say no.”
“I’ve seen rage from him, Chip,” Gibbs insisted. “I have.” Reid asked for an exact definition of what constitutes emotion for Obama: “Can you describe it? Does he yell and scream? What does he do?” Gibbs mentioned the words “clenched jaw” and the president’s admonition to “plug the damn hole.” How does a man who invented himself as a force by writing one of the most eloquent memoirs in political history lose control of his own narrative?
