When the word got out that President Obama was being fairly hands-off on the Captain Phillips crisis, some conservatives complained.

Not I.  I figured if there is a situation a President needs to delegate, this one – a fast-breaking crisis on the razor’s edge of life and death – is the one.  It should be the kind of situation where a President – and the next several echelons below him – say “we’ll seek a diplomatic solution, but you, the commander on the scene, need to use your discretion; you’ve trained for this sort of thing your whole career.  If there’s a threat to the hostage, you use your discretion, and I’ll back you on it”.

And if that’s how Obama would have handled things, I’d have nodded and said “Good job, Mr. President”, not that anyone cares.

But that’s apparently not how it happened:

Late last week, when it did not want it to appear that the president was acting like a cowboy, the Administration was content to say that Obama was taking a low key approach to the pirate hostage drama, leaving the decision making to others and perhaps hedging against a bad result.

So far, so good.

But once news of Phillips’ rescue reached the United States, the Administration was quick to try and claim at least a share of the credit for the president.

Was it the President’s handlers who did this?  Likely enough.  It’s Obama’s staff and minions and Congressional support that are the bulk of the problems with this Administration in the first place.

It is not quite shameless exploitation – presidents always get more credit, and blame, than they likely deserve for events that happen under their watch – but it is playing politics.

As a legislator, President Obama had the luxury of taking both sides of an issue to position himself politically. But as president, especially in matters of national security, the president does not have that luxury, and he cannot seek it. Perhaps with more experience, President Obama will be able to chart a course and be willing to accept the consequences of his decisions, good and bad. But in the events of the last week off the coast of Africa, President Obama showed himself to be not yet ready to act decisively before knowing how the political winds will blow.

Bill Clinton was accused of the same thing – but then, the “threats” he faced (the ones that weren’t bomb attacks that resolved themselves instantly, anyway) were all to his political power, not the nation.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 at 5:31 am and is filed under President Obama, War On Terror. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.