Chapel Hill’s G-Man mulls the federal response to Ophelia:
There’s a Hurricane hitting the United States and where is George W. Bush? He’s off rubbing elbows with foreigners at the United Nations. This man never learns, does he? Two weeks ago he was out west meeting with a veterans group when Katrina came ashore. Now he’s in New York while North Carolina is threatened. Can’t our President prioritize any better than that? I mean, leaving the emergency management to state and local authorities — has he no shame? Everyone knows the President must call every shot.
The expectation so deservedly mocked by G-Man is, I think, a hangover from the positively empathic Clinton era, which Richard M. Levine himself mocked in the the lefty journal Mother Jones way back in 1993:
The first time I realized that Phil Donahue was going to be president was the day before the New York primary, in April l992, when Bill Clinton debated Jerry Brown on “Donahue.” Donahue himself hardly spoke a word that day. He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Governor Brown and Governor Clinton,” at the start of the show, and “Gentlemen, thank you both,” at the end. In between, Bill Clinton was Phil Donahue. ….
… Above all, Clinton reached out to the rest of us in what I’ve come to think of, even on “Donahue,” as Oprahland, a place populated by victims of one darn thing or another. “People are hurting all over this country,” he said, as he would over and over during the campaign. “You can see the pain in their faces, the hurt in their voices.” You could plainly see the pain in his face (especially since he bit his lower lip in an empathetic gesture before making the pronouncement) and hear the hurt in his overworked voice. Clinton was successfully presenting his own brand of self-help politics on television’s longest-running self-help show, merging the public realm with the private, citizenship with co-dependency.
That’s pretty much it in a nutshell, folks. If you think every citizen is a dependent of the federal government, then, yes, the President needs to call every shot.
