Politicians, Step Aside

[Who wears fine leather shoes and white shirts and blazers to an oil spill?]


What are community organizers (or any garden-variety politicans) good for?

They are really, really good at talking. They talk by themsevles on soapboxes and at podiums and lecterns. They talk on committees and in small groups pounding out and refining legislation. They talk to reporters. Sometimes they even talk to their constituents, or their would-be constituents.

The idea is that they are soooo good at talking that they inspire people to take action, but they rarely, if ever, take action themselves. I am racking my brain to remember a president actually DOING anything other than ceremonial types of things like throwing out the first pitch at a ball game or placing a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns. (I heard once that George W. Bush liked to remove brush from his ranch in Crawford, but I never actually saw footage of him uprooting anything.)

This gift of gab only becomes an issue when actual problems arise that can't be resolved with words alone, like the Gulf oil catastrophe. Obama initially reacted to the crisis by publicly, bitterly deriding British Petroleum as if to clarify that it was all BP's fault -- a fact which is not yet a fact. No one knows why the oil platform blew up, though an invesitgation is underway. Ironically, the platform could have been blown up by radical environmentalists reacting to Obama's recent decision to allow more off-shore drilling.

Anyone who has experience dealing with crises knows that that blame is the last thing to be resolved. First, we should have announced our commitment to work as partners with BP to stop the flow of oil into the Gulf. We should not have talked about keeping our boot on BP's neck - what a ridiculous and counter-productive image that is, though it has been stated over and over again by adminstration officials, espcially Salazar and Gibbs. We should have positioned all requisite government resources in the vicinity to be used as needed while convening the world's most knowledgable and experienced experts to hear their ideas and discuss pros and cons, then we should have started trying their solutions while drilling a relief well, the long-term but surest solution, just in case all of the quicker resolutions failed.

Next time, I want a president who can DO something. I want him or her to have some sort of potentially useful hobby, an actual, demonstrable skill. Maybe he'll know how to plant a garden or write a poem or bake brownies. It would be really cool if he or she knew something about carpentry or how to fix a car. I'll take a computer geek or a ten-key whiz or a lifeguard.

No more verbose politicians standing impotently on the sidelines denigrating people who are actually DOING something.

My next president does not have to know everything, but he has to know how to DO something.