The oil-drenched pelicans come home to roost

Just for giggles, let’s play “what if?” for a second.

Let’s pretend it’s, say, early April, and President Obama calls a press conference to announce that, due to poor practices in the Minerals Management Service, he and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar have determined that many of the nation’s hundreds of deep-water off-shore drilling sites may not have been inspected as thoroughly as they should. Just to be on the safe side, he says, we’re going to suspend production at deep-water wells for six months to make sure that they’re all safe.

Let’s imagine how Republicans in Congress react. Let’s imagine how the media and blogosphere react. Let’s mentally compose some run-on sentences for Sarah Palin’s Facebook page. Let’s keep in mind that, for the entire year previous, the president couldn’t so much as roll out of bed without being called a socialist. (Reality interlude: delivering millions of new customers to health insurance corporations is not a socialist act.)

We all know how loudly the president’s opponents would’ve screamed. They weren’t even happy when Obama did the exact opposite of the above scenario, and announced an expansion of deep-water drilling rights just days before the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, which is still spewing hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

The chickens (or, in this case, the oil-covered pelicans) aren’t just coming home to roost for conservatives, though. A few weeks ago on ABC’s “This Week,” my future husband George Will said that what we’re seeing now (in the criticism that Obama isn’t moving fast enough) is the product of nearly 50 years of concentrating executive power – for which we have to thank LBJ (and FDR, for that matter). (Video here... Will's comments start about one minute in.)

He’s right. It’s physically impossible for the president to manage everything we ask him to manage, which is why we’ve developed such a sprawling executive branch bureaucracy to manage it all. But yet – especially in times of crisis – we still seem to expect that the president will personally fix the problem. As Joan Walsh said on that same panel, we can’t expect the president to be Daddy… and yet, we do.

Presidents love it, too – what’s not to like about getting to take credit for positive things that had nothing to do with you other than that they happened to take place on your watch? Well… there’s the fact that you also get to own the bad things that had nothing to do with you other than that they happened to take place on your watch. In this sense (and pretty much only in this sense), the Gulf oil spill is indeed Obama’s Katrina.

The president’s most important job is to hire people. This also means knowing when and how to delegate responsibility – and yes, blame; the last Democratic president who found himself unable to do this quickly found himself on a plane back to Plains. Obama’s got to learn that, when you get up on TV and tell the American people that you’re personally on top of a situation, then you own that situation all the way – for better or worse.