BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
The oil spill catastrophe has set off a new round of finger pointing. Oil company executives were crawling over each other a week ago to place blame on each other.
And, the President is doing what he does extremely well, branding oil company executives as villains and the rest of us as victims of their villainous behavior.
Who knows where the blame will ultimately lie. There will be plenty to go around.
I have no interest in, or sympathy for, British Petroleum. They ought to pay out of the wazzoo.
My concern is with the politics of the blame game, especially during these times when nerves are shot, the public nerves are on edge already and people are just looking for an excuse to get mad. Also of concern is the more profound impact on the civility of our political dialogue.
Throughout the campaign, while candidate Obama was promising to be a healer and a uniter, he was engaged in a sophisticated strategy to divide, to create victims and villains in American politics, identifying for his supporters at whom they should be mad and for whom they should show pity. That is par for the course in political campaigns. But to my surprise, the strategy was intensified after he became President. Over the past two years he has created the false imagery of a society in which you’re either a victim or a villain. In a constant display of high dexterity finger pointing he has made villains of lobbyists, Wall Street firms, doctors, insurance companies, auto executives, talk radio celebrities, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Fox News, bankers, tea partiers, Republicans, conservatives, gun owners, the entire state of Arizona, and now, for a repeat performance, oil company executives.
With anger and fear and frustration permeating our politics, we need a President dedicated to healing and uniting.
In the political heat of a campaign, the intent is to draw lines of distinction and drive wedges into the differences between candidates. The issues are painted in black and white. There is no gray. But when it is time to govern, the shades of color change. The differences become less distinct. Governing is mostly gray. Decisions are less a matter of right or wrong and more a matter of choices, neither right nor wrong. Governing has little to do with victims and villains and more to do with balancing expectations against critical needs, balancing compassion with common sense, balancing politics with pragmatism and holding firm to the values that brought you to governing in the first place.
That does not suggest the Justice Department shouldn’t be aggressive in investigating big oil.
There are surely villains in our society and there are certainly victims, but for the most part they are not whole classes of people or entire industries. The President is wrong to suggest otherwise.
When you see the pictures coming back from the Gulf Coast and the almost round-the-clock footage of the oil surging from that pipe below the ocean, it is easy to get angry and look around for someone to blame. It is such an inexcusable and senseless tragedy. But getting mad all the time is tiring and unproductive. We should keep the focus on solutions and the President should keep us focused on solutions, some of which will ultimately involve prosecuting crime and negligence and improving regulation.
But this constant exercise in the righteous indignation of blame is unbecoming any President, especially this one, who held out such great promise of unity and healing.
We expect him to grit his teeth and rise above it. A President who foments anger and gives us all an excuse to despise others becomes part of the problem.
Editors’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.