Gulf Oil Leak: Carlton Banks to the Rescue!

Since the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up on April 20, President Obama has been rightly and roundly criticized for his lethargic, passionless, and ineffective response to the crisis. We’re now into the 7th week of this catastrophe, and the president still looks weirdly disengaged: not only that he either doesn’t know what he’s doing or isn’t that interested in the crisis. It’s that he looks like he doesn’t belong in the job. He looks like a little boy stomping around the house wearing his father’s suit and shoes.

Stung by the attacks on his competence, character, and emotionlessness, Obama contrived some “passion” the other day. In an interview with the “Today” show, he said, “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.”

Oh no! Anything but a Bama ass-kickin’! The terror of that prospect I’m sure has BP shaking in its boots. (By the way, running college seminars is ALL the Bama knows how to do, so he probably should be doing that. Maybe some college senior somewhere has a Descartes-inspired idea on how to plug the damn hole.)

Rule #1 in politics: Do not try to be something that you’re not.When President George H. W. Bush was running behind Bill Clinton in 1992, he went into a grocery store and pretended to love beef jerky. You know: to demonstrate that he was just a regular guy. The problem was: he wasn’t just a regular guy. He was Andover and Yale and the Eastern establishment. His father had been a U.S. Senator. Bush didn’t even know what beef jerky was, for crying out loud. He lost the election.

Obama trying to show he’s an angry avenger when he’s essentially an automaton isn’t going to work either. He is Carlton Banks, not Suge Knight. He’s a navel-gazing, community organizing law professor, not a put-a-cap-in-your-ass gangbanger. He should stop with the phony theatrics

and be who he is. The problem with that is that he’s a community organizing law professor, not an American president.