Barack Obama built an organization based on three simple words.
No....not "Yes We Can!".... that was the slogan. I'm talking about the mission statement.
Include. Empower. Respect.
He had a perfect chance to do that last night and he didn't use it. There was no "ask" in his message.
Here's what the president of the United States, the bastion of truth, justice, and the American way, could have declared that would have changed this whole slow-motion nightmare into something very different...
All he had to declare was this:
The federal government is lifting the ban on airflights by individuals and journalists over the Gulf. All credentialed journalists will be permitted to cover the story directly.
The Gulf is dying.
Communities that have withstood more than a century
of catastrophes, both natural and man-made, are dying.
Soon, the people working in The Soup will start dying.
I don't expect him to fix it.
I don't want a "bullhorn moment".
I don't want cookies and milk.
I don't want a pony.
I don't want to be handled.
I want the truth.
Now, when it can still help us.
Not thirty years from now when the victims are dead and buried
and those responsible beyond the reach of justice.
We hear journalists are blocked from covering this story. Why is that?
When hurricanes hit, we joke about the "Dan on the boardwalk" shot. You know the one I mean. It's the live "we are here" remote shot that ends with the anchor back in the studio saying "thanks Dan, now get somewhere safe, will ya?" When we go to war, journalists cover the Marines. When the towers came down, journalists were covered in debris. Now rent-a-cops cover the camera lenses and tell journalists to take a hike. And we stand for that? In America?
Even the information we are getting from the government feels constrained and choked. Originally we had NOAA and NASA satellite imagery showing the oily monster growing...growing...spreading. We had data being collected from the sea and the air. What happened to that? Why isn't the Gulf crawling with scientists and engineers? Where are the Woods Hole boats? The San Diego boats? Have the marine biologists gone on vacation? I don't think so.
Since May, nothing. NOAA has charts. But I haven't been able to find any updated satellite images of note. We don't see any updated satellite images on the news. We sure as hell don't see any on site footage.
So much for "included, empowered, and respected."
Instead, they show us a crappy underwater shot, but then we learn much later the hi-resolution shot was simply not being shared. CNN talks to families. Newspapers talk about local impacts. But BP doesn't do press conferences. They manage the information from their web site. What they can't manage they try to corral by leasing Google adwords.
When Natalie Halloway disappeared -- wall to wall.
When Tiger Woods fell from grace -- wall to wall.
When the shuttle blew up -- wall to wall.
Why? Because media was covering it and that meant people were talking about it. Media made it real.
People think because they don't hear about this that it's capped or will be soon. People don't understand the Gulf is dying.
"Oh well, they survived Katrina. They'll survive this."
Carl Safina, from the Blue Ocean Institute, had an ominous response to that pollyannish thinking:
Katrina brought water and wind.
When Katrina left, the water and wind left, too.
When this is over, the oil will still be there.
Is it really too much to ask for one simple declaration by the president that could change the Weapon of Mass Distraction that lights up our livingrooms into a Tool for Change? Instead of that, we get incrementalism and verbiage. As time goes on, the official size of the catastrophe is slowly being increased; just like the number of dead soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. 3,000 Americans killed in one day? That's news. 3,000 in a few years.... * yawn *
Now we hear the rate of flow could easily be as much as 60,000 barrels a day. The WSJ is playing it safe and saying 25,000 barrels a day. None of these numbers surprise me. Just based on geometry and BP's own numbers, I estimated 88,000 barrels a day. My numbers were well within the initial official estimates made by the USCG and NOAA on April 22. They reported a range as high as 110,000 barrels a day for a full blow out. That's their number for just one leak. Remember, there is more than one leak site.
The truth is we don't even know how bad this is. Which means it is probably worse than we can imagine. Just like the war cost us more than we could imagine. Just like the bail outs cost us more than we could imagine. Chalk it up to the poverty of imagination, but humans don't handle big numbers well. Without images, those numbers disappear into a haze of "too big to contemplate."
People have been providing videos of solutions. People have been offering alternatives to Corexit. People have been warning about the toxic risk to clean up workers. People have been lobbying Washington to use their technology. But they are not included. They are not empowered. They are not respected.
BP does its own thing and now we learn the ship they were using to collect the oil they were getting caught fire. So they had to stop for awhile.
If the president had made that simple declaration, a declaration that is well within his power, a declaration that would have cost him virtually nothing, he would have unleashed the media to cover this without the government aiding corporate spinmeisters.
He could have turned that Weapon of Mass Distraction that sits in our living rooms into a Tool for Change. He could have included us by informing us. He could have empowered us by focusing us. He could have respected us by letting us see the truth for ourselves.
He didn't do that, so instead of being included, empowered or respected we are left with a narcotizing message of "Everyone chill out, we got this."
And the band plays on....