The Other McCain

• What do you call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?
• A good start!

When I endorsed the idea of using lawyers to plug the the BP oil well, this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind:

The Washington Post reports that President Obama has named a lawyer to supervise oil drilling. “President Obama has selected Michael Bromwich, a partner in the law firm Fried Frank’s Washington D.C. and New York offices, to head the Minerals Management Service, the troubled agency that oversees offshore oil drilling, according to senior administration officials.” Bromwich has no experience in supervising oil drilling, like his predecessor Elizabeth Birnbaum, who was chosen “to head the MMS in large part because of her record of environmental and green-energy advocacy.” Ignorance of the complexities of oil drilling is no handicap.

That’s from Richard Fernandez at Pajamas Media. We should not be surprised that Obama, whose original claim to fame was being editor of Harvard Law Review, would prefer lawyers to actual experts in such key positions. It’s the flawed logic credentialism:

• Law school graduates are smart;
• Smart people solve problems; therefore
• All problems can be solved by law school graduates.

And if you don’t have a law degree? Shut up, stupid.

Obama’s obvious prejudice in favor of his own class reminds me of Friedrich Hayek’s description of the intellectual, who “need not possess special knowledge of anything in particular, nor need he even be particularly intelligent.”

I did not watch President Obama’s Big Spill speech Tuesday night because (a) I was busy on something else and (b) I can’t stand to watch Democrats talk policy.

It’s annoying enough to listen to Republicans talk policy, but Democrats are so reliably 100% wrong that there is no point watching unless I just want to feel angry. And with my daughter’s wedding just three weeks away, there are already too many annoying things to make me angry.

Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews and Howard Fineman get paid to watch Obama’s speeches, however, and their reactions on MSNBC to the Big Spill speech were interesting:

Olbermann: “It was a great speech if you were on another planet for the last 57 days. . . . Nothing specific at all was said.”
Matthews: “No direction.”
Howard Fineman: “He wasn’t specific enough.”
Olbermann: “I don’t think he aimed low, I don’t think he aimed at all. It’s startling.”

Which is to say, they’re starting to figure out that being President of the United States has not conferred magical powers on Obama, and he didn’t bring any magical powers of his own to the job.

A degree from Harvard Law isn’t necessarily helpful to fixing a mechanical engineering problem, which is what BP is dealing with in trying to cap the Deepwater Horizon well.

The Gulf oil spill is not a political problem. You can’t negotiate a compromise with a broken well. Nor is the oil spill a legal problem. You can sue BP, but litigation isn’t going to cap that well. And all the “community organizing” in the world isn’t going to fix the problem, unless you’re planning to plug the well with SEIU members.

What is Obama’s greatest skill? Reading speeches. As I remarked in February 2009, Obama could read the ingredients from the side panel of a box of pancake batter (“…dextrose, partially hydrogenated soybean oil with mono- and diglycerides…“) and inspire standing ovations from an audience of adoring Democrats.  But all Obama’s oratorical powers are useless to the task of plugging that well.

The disappointment of the MSNBC personalities at the lack of specificity in Obama’s Big Spill speech was ironic to me, because I wrote in November 2008:

Perhaps the most brilliant thing about Barack Obama’s successful campaign was its vagueness. In offering himself as the all-purpose Change We Can Believe In, Obama gave believers a blank slate and a tacit license to project upon him their deepest longings.

Obama’s shortcomings in this crisis should not surprise anyone. As was repeatedly pointed out by Obama’s critics during the 2008 campaign, he had no executive experience. His campaign was about fine-sounding rhetoric, boundless promises and grandiose symbolism. His background was as a liberal activist, an academic and a state legislator.

Most of all, we were told, Obama was qualified to be president because he had such an excellent temperament.

Too bad you can’t plug an oil well with temperament.

UPDATE: Now a Memeorandum thread. Linked by Cassy Fiano, King Shamus, Political Byline, Fausta Wertz, Scared Monkeys, Jules Crittenden and Bob Belvedere at Camp of the Saints.