Posted on 06/30/2010 6:58:43 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Rule One of great acting is, Do not read the stage directions.
You don’t, for instance, wrap up Hamlet’s big Act Two soliloquy — “ . . . the play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King” — and then say “Exit.”
Years ago, during the George H. W. Bush administration, public-opinion surveys began to register a troubling trend for a president campaigning for reelection: More and more people felt that Bush just didn’t care about people’s suffering during the (fairly shallow) recession of the early 1990s.
You’ve got to send them the message that you care, they told him. So, dutifully, in his next big public outing, he tried to send the message to the voters that he cared. He wound up a boilerplate stump speech by declaring, with as much passion as he could muster, “Message: I care!”
No, no, Mr. President, you could imagine his advisers saying. The “message” part is for us, it’s an internal thing. You’re supposed to give them the message that you care. By showing that you care.
Right, he might have replied, I did that. How much clearer could I have been?
You’re not supposed to say the “message” part, they might have replied as the presidential limo sped away.
But it says right here on the talking-points card you gave me, he could have shouted back. Right here! “Message: I care!”
But by that time, a pudgy governor of Arkansas had already bit his lower lip, felt our pain, and made us temporarily ignore his brittle wife. That was a guy who understood Rule One.
The truth was, Bush really didn’t care. The 1990–91 recession was almost over by the time he started getting walloped in the polls, before someone had handed him a memo titled “Messaging That Bush Cares” or something equally futile. Unemployment, slow growth, these things had already started turning around. There was nothing for him to do. And as all grownups know, recessions happen.
But saying “Message: I care!” captured all of the loose threads out in the crazytown of public opinion and braided them together into part of the rope that ended up hanging the first Bush administration.
Twenty years later, everyone seems to be exercised over President Obama’s recent declaration that his big project, when confronting the massive, gushing BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, is to figure out “whose ass to kick.”
Talking to Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today show, our skinny president said the following deeply Freudian thing: “I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar. We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers — so I know whose ass to kick.”
I’m not as interested as the rest of the world is, I guess, in the “whose ass to kick” part of the declaration. Show more emotion, I’m sure Obama’s advisers have been saying to him since the oil started to gush. Be more passionate. Send people the message that you care. And so he did — absurdly, but that’s what happens to presidents when they hit the oil slick. At least he didn’t say, “Message: I’m going to kick some ass.”
Here’s the part I find the most interesting: “I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar.” This from the former professor who ran a health-care-reform summit meeting like the cranky chairman of a faculty committee at a third-rate college. Who finds it impossible to describe something as simple and clear as Islamic fundamentalism without weasel-wording equivocation. Who, in other words, thinks this is a college seminar.
I am not, let me stipulate at the outset, a licensed psychiatrist. My understanding of the works of Sigmund Freud are cursory — college psychology class; skimmed the reading, bluffed my way through the exam — and it pains me to admit that I am, still, not legally allowed to prescribe drugs.
But I know the basics. I know that we get weird in the pre-verbal stage of development. I know that we have malignant egos. I know that we end up marrying the closest approximation to our most complicated parent. And I know that when we say things, we often inadvertently reveal the truth about ourselves. A Freudian slip, for example, is when we say one thing when we mean a mother. Another. You know what I mean.
When a person — especially someone as tightly wound as our president — emphatically declares something that sounds a little too specific, watch out. He’s not making a point; he’s reading the stage directions. He’s telling you what he’s afraid you think of him, and he’s often correct.
Psychiatrists love this little trick, because it makes their work so incredibly easy. You just wait for the patient to say something weird about himself, and you pounce. Voters do the same thing. When George H. W. Bush tried to show voters the scale of his caring by barking, “Message: I care!” they all suddenly saw the president of the United States stretched out on a Mies daybed, and they scribbled in their notebooks, “Patient seems concerned re: not caring impression. Patient may lack proper sympathy.”
But psychiatrists don’t fire patients — not at $300 per session. Voters, on the other hand, positively relish it.
All of this is a little unfair, of course. A president who spent his entire working life in either a crackpot left-wing nonprofit or a law school — although when you say it like that, it’s hard to tell the difference — couldn’t be expected to know anything about the complexities of deep-water drilling, the physics of oil under pressure, the trajectory of an oil slick as it slimes its way to shore.
So, yes, it’s easy to imagine that there’s been a bit of the college seminar going on there, in the Oval Office.
But why so defensive? Or, as we might have scribbled in our notebooks as President Obama took his place on the couch: “Patient v. v. defensive re: lack of oil knowledge. Ego bruise? Anger due to inflated sense of self vs. inability to stop oil leak? Anger due to sense of self under fire from oil leak, voters, etc.? Sense that like college seminar, he is all talk, no action?”
All of which is accurate. And all of which seems to be what voters are thinking.
Especially when he added, gratuitously, that he wanted to know “whose ass to kick,” when everyone knew that what he really meant was “whose ass to sue,” which doesn’t sound very butch.
It’s been said that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is Obama’s Katrina, but that’s really not accurate. It’s Obama’s “Message: I care” moment. It’s when he started to read the stage directions.
A brilliant actor once told me that the hardest thing to play is drunk. And then he told me how to do it.
You play not drunk. You don’t play a guy weaving and slurring and bumping into stuff. You play a guy consciously, deliberately, carefully not doing any of those things. The way you indicate how immensely incapacitated you are, in other words, is to act super, super sober, to declare, in other words, that not only are you not drunk, you’re the opposite of drunk. Which just makes you seem incredibly drunk.
Audiences find this hilarious. Voters, well, we shall see.
— Rob Long is a contributing editor of National Review and a contributor to Ricochet
I’d be insecure too if I were complicit in causing an environmental oil disaster by greasing the wheels for campaign contributor BP that may continue damaging America’s coastline and natural habitats for decades into the future.
I enjoyed that.
LOL! Spot on!
BUMP!
Barry "This Is Not a Cap" OPuppet misspoke. He meant "whose ass to kiss". Supra-national corporations + international totalitarian elitist interlopers = neo fascism. Too big to fail.
That’s the funniest thing I’ve read in a long time. It can only be funny because its subject is such a pathetic clown.
Obama’s failure goes farther than loose regulatory oversight. Every oil spill, by contract, is a shared partnership between the operating company and the federal government, with the government retaining a 51% share of that responsibility. It is the responsibility of the feds to assess the spill and the ability of the operating company to handle the clean up, then decide whether the Coast Guard should take control of the spill clean up. It’s called and Incident Command Agreement. Obama should have realized on day one that BP had more than they could handle, just trying to stop the spewing oil well.
Instead, Obama delayed and partied and fund raised and obstructed, refused every reasonable offer of help and refused to let the Gulf states manage the clean up and protection of their own shores. I forgot to mention that if the oil is withing the state’s area of control, the state is considered a partner, also. So, once again, Obama is thwarting the states’ rights of red states. He seems to be giving Florida a pass, though, allowing Florida to take steps that are not approved by the FEDS.
And despite Obama’s complicity with the oil spill, he’s poised to benefit from the Cap and Trade scam that may only be possible to pass because of it. It’s a double irony.
Thanks for the information. Reading about Incident Command System (ICS) now.
Personnel
ICS is organized by levels, with the supervisor of each level holding a unique title (e.g. only a person in charge of a Section is labeled “Chief”; a “Director” is exclusively the person in charge of a Branch). Levels (supervising person’s title) are:
Incident Commander
Command Staff Member (Officer)- Command Staff
Section (Chief)- General Staff
Branch (Director)
Division (Supervisor) - A Division is a unit arranged by geography, along jurisdictional lines if necessary, and not based on the makeup of the resources within the Division.
Group (Supervisor) - A Group is a unit arranged for a purpose, along agency lines if necessary, or based on the makeup of the resources within the Group.
Unit, Team, or Force (Leader) - Such as “Communications Unit,” “Medical Strike Team,” or a “Reconnaissance Task Force.” A Strike Team is composed of same resources (four ambulances, for instance) while a Task Force is composed of different types of resources (one ambulance, two fire trucks, and a police car, for instance).
Individual Resource. This is the smallest level within ICS and usually refers to a single person or piece of equipment. It can refer to a piece of equipment and operator, and less often to multiple people working together.
(my comment...we must be at 400-Level)
400-Level ICS
At the ICS 400 level, the focus is on large, complex incidents. Topics covered include the characterists of incident complexity, the approachs to dividing an incident into manageable components, the establishment of an “Area Command,” and MultiAgency Coordination (MAC).
Some of the options for dividing an incident into components include the following:
Dual Operations Section Chiefs.
Dual Logistics Section Chiefs.
While the dual OSC and LSC approaches are taught in the FEMA curriculum, most practitioners of ICS disapprove of this expansion technique.
(my comment...I’ll sleep better tonight knowing that the bureaucracy is in order and their T-Cards are in place. /sarcasm)
T-Cards (ICS 219, Resource Status Card) are most commonly used to track these resources. The cards are placed in T-Card racks located at an Incident Command Post for easy updating and visual tracking of resource status.
Yeah, it is. Everything is a WIN/WIN for internationalist-totalitarian-elitist-interlopers. Just ask Al "No Controlling Legal Authority" Gore.
When you have an incident this large and this complex, keeping order and chain of command is important. You have Coast Guard, BP workers and civilian advisers (with incident command training) all working together. They have been working straight out, 12 and 15 hour days in shifts of two weeks each, while they keep up with their other jobs at the same time. While BP may have caused the spill through their cost cutting methods of operation, they are sparing no expense now to get control of this spill.
They have a framework for bureaucracy. Did they have a framework for problem solving? Root cause? Perhaps this...
5. D3 - Containment (in the 8-D approach).
http://www.ahmadfauzi.com/Download/8D.pdf
The bureaucrats and the corporation have failed on so many levels.
What are we at...day 70 + + + and continuing?
I won’t even mention a framework for transparency...instead of blackout of news with the government, the mainstream media and the corporation.
The problem solving, i.e., the spill itself and prevention of future spills is a different problem with a whole different set of issues and people. BP once offered my husband the job of crisis management for the west coast of the US. He turned it down because he didn’t want to be simply a clean up person without any say in preventing the problems or setting policy. It’s still very separate, except in the marine end of the issue. Part of the problem comes from the compartmentalization and specialization of jobs. The other part of problem is arising from the politicization of the oil industry (and it’s not limited to the oil industry). Industry realized that they can win great favor with the left by adopting their green agenda and working with the leftist politicians and bureaucrats in areas of their agenda that don’t conflict with the company’s interests. I was calling it fascism, but yesterday, I read that it is called, neo-fascism. I like that term.
Neo-fascism works in the same way as public sector unions, the favored companies work in concert with the government officials to the benefit of the companies and the government, but not the public. The people are irrelevant and soon, they won’t even need the non-union people for voting. The only answer is to keep pointing out the cozy relationship between the politicians and the oil industry, while pointing out the failures on both sides.
Thanks Eva. Good for your husband. Neo-fascism...it fits.
One of Saul Alinsky’s rules was that if you have someone that gets in the way of achieving your agenda, you give them a job and make them part of the agenda, thwarting the person’s efforts to fight against the agenda. That’s kind of how we viewed BP’s job offer.
It takes a very principled, forward-thinking, responsible-for-your-actions employee to reject an offer that many would be glad to have. (hat-tip to you and your husband.)
IIRC wasn't BP voicing some concerns very recently (before the disaster) about the East Anglia/IPCC Climategate scandal?
Heading the crisis management team was a terrible job, like being the fire chief in a town full of pyromaniacs. My husband has had 25 year history of dealing with BP and it hasn’t been good.
I don’t know if BP made any statement about E. Anglia, but they pulled out of that oil/government agreement just before the spill, leaving CONOCO and Shell. CONOCO joined just before BP pulled out. CONOCO has been moving to emulate BP and I have to wonder if they are second thinking their current modus operandi.
Something interesting is that the reports that the skimmers were being held up by the EPA seems to be true. It had nothing to do with the Jones Act. The EPA is demanding that the water that is skimmed be cleaned to 98.? % before it is returned to the Gulf. In other words, they are putting impossible requirements on any skimmers. They don’t want the Gulf cleaned up until they get their Cap and trade.
Thanks much for some first-hand knowledge and information, Eva. Kudos to your husband and you.
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