Obama fails the test of leadership

Barack Obama's inexperience and inability to make a decision is showing in Obama's failure to lead during the 45-day-old Gulf oil spill crisis, argues Keith Koffler.

From his column in POLITICO:

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs tweeted to the world recently that President Barack Obama had on his night table "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt," Edmund Morris' rip-roaring, Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the formative years of America's most colorful president.

Presumably, Gibbs was implying that the great man now occupying the White House was taking pointers from the great man who preceded him.

Politicians just love to see themselves as leaders like Teddy Roosevelt or Winston Churchill — giants who trampled over obstacles with unyielding doggedness and even a kind of childlike insouciance.

As Obama underachieves his way through the Gulf of Mexico oil spill crisis, Gibbs's effort to link the president to Roosevelt makes the opposite point intended: Great leaders are a very rare thing, and the man in the White House today ain't one of them — at least not yet.

Obama's detached performance with respect to this massive and growing crisis — the ripple effects of which could still be with us on Election Day 2012 — is generally portrayed as a PR meltdown and a simple failure to step up by an understandably beleaguered Obama.

Read the full column at the link below:

Obama fails the test of leadership - Keith Koffler - POLITICO.comC