The irony is that George W. Bush played the Daddy role with conviction. He grabbed a bullhorn at the World Trade Center and said, “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” When he went to West Point and made speeches, there was no dispiriting nuance to his message to the troops. We were over there in Iraq to kick ass and take names.

We know what happened next…

Obama can’t change his cool disposition though it would be nice if he lost the vaguely grudging air he gives off that problems of management get in the way of ideas. What he lacks in Big Daddy empathy skills he just has to make up for in raw politics. Bill Clinton was the master of that, mostly because unlike Obama he enjoyed it. By now Clinton would have reached out to every one on the planet (even James Cameron) who knew anything about deep sea drilling and absorbed those competing opinions into the radar of his responses. He would have convened all those Republican Gulf State governors at the White House right away, and in doing so won political points for showing the true meaning of bipartisanship. He would have summoned not just this new BP character, the faceless chairman, but the familiar, juicy target, Tony Heyward—if only so the public could see the delinquent CEO ordered like a chastened schoolboy to the principal’s office. He would have convened not just BP but all the other oil companies to force out the best ideas in a fanfared Oval Office meeting. And for sure he would have called James Carville personally and got his yelling fetus-face off CNN. That alone would make us all feel better about what really ails us all: The feeling that the black, gushing oil spill is a huge and terrifying metaphor for the loss of American power, an overwhelming karmic punishment for the profligacy of our civilization as we burn up billions of dollars of biological material in a few short hours.