How can this be possible?

Much has been made of the question where Matt Lauer asked president obama whther or not he had spoken to the CEO of BP and Obama admitted that no such conversation had taken place. At first glance, this seems extraordinary. Eight weeks into this crisis, Obama has not bothered to pick up the phone and call the head of BP.

Now that I a bit of time has gone by, I reconsidered my view. Obama's conduct is not extraordinary. No, it is way beyond that. It is a manifestation of Obama's complete lack of involvement with the realities of the crisis. After all, such a call would be made in private and there would be no teleprompter or photo op. As a result, this common sense management tool would never occur to Obama.

I have tried to imagine how Obama could possibly avoid making that call once the crisis became clear. Normally, a leader would have called the head of BP to see if there were any impediments to getting the leak stopped. A leader would have asked if there were any problems being caused by the federal government. Obviously, since the feds were unable to give Governor Jindal permission to build berms for six weeks after he made that request (while the oil fouled and killed the marshes as a result of the delay), it might have reached Obama's consciousness that maybe someone in the federal government was not acting as quickly or as rationally as one would like. Obama's lack of action here is proof of his lack of leadership ability.

A friend of mine tells me that he is shocked that no one around Obama had the sense to tell him that he should call the BP CEO. Strangely, that does not shock me. These are all politicians who want to be as far from the trouble as possible. They do not realize that the president has to try to take control or at least to try to mitigate the damage.