I don’t think Obama has, as yet, reached a point where most Americans think of him in those terms. But many more do now than did forty-odd days ago, and many of those people are from within the ranks of Obama’s own supporters. Only about a third of those asked approve of the way he has handled this crisis. So it will do the president not one whit of political good to allow the situation in the Gulf to persist without his being seen to be in the thick of the rescue, in the belly of the cleanup, at the manful forefront of the effort to arrest the Gulf of Mexico disaster.

Once the fate of a presidency becomes twinned with its success in fighting a national crisis, one cannot but wish that the president survives the crisis more or less intact: The alternative here, a once-in-a-lifetime environmental disaster in which a crippled presidency is only the lesser of a host of enduring national nightmares, is too awful to contemplate.