Two of our top, most respected op-ed writers!

Tom Friedman:

Malia for President

It took almost the entire press conference at the White House on Thursday for President Obama to find his voice in responding to the oil disaster in the gulf — and it is probably no accident that it seemed like the only unrehearsed moment. The president was trying to convey why he takes this problem so seriously, when he noted:

“When I woke this morning and I’m shaving and Malia knocks on my bathroom door and she peeks in her head and she says, ‘Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?’ ..."

And a child shall lead them. ...

... as the nation’s C.E.O., Mr. Obama has to oversee the cleanup, and he has been on top of that. His most important job, though, is one he has yet to take on: shaping the long-term public reaction to the spill so that we can use it to generate the political will to break our addiction to oil. In that job, the most important thing Mr. Obama can do is react to this spill as a child would ...

... he has to think like a kid. Kids get it.

David "The Dean" Broder:

The president adds a personal note to oil spill crisis

It took almost a full hour of Barack Obama's news conference for the professor-president to come down from his lecture platform and show the human reaction to the gulf oil leak accident that people had been looking for.

... he gave the country something ... a brief glimpse into what the challenges of his job mean to him personally.

"When I woke up this morning and I'm shaving, and Malia knocks on my bathroom door and she peeks in her head and she says, 'Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?' "

The next sentence leaps from the mundane to the universal. "I think everybody understands that when we are fouling the Earth like this, it has concrete implications not just for this generation but for future generations."

What he says next is so simple and personal that its authenticity cannot be doubted: "I grew up in Hawaii, where the ocean is sacred."

Apparently neither of these op-ed giants are familiar with the ridicule Jimmy Carter got for his performance in a presidential debate:

... it was President Carter's reference to his consultation with 12-year-old daughter Amy concerning nuclear weapons policy that became the focus of post-debate analysis and fodder for late-night television jokes. President Carter said he had asked Amy what the most important issue in that election was and she said, "the control of nuclear arms."

Which certainly met Friedman's "thinking like a kid" standard, and Broder's "personal" metric.


posted by Quiddity at 5/30/2010 06:13:00 AM