TO REALIZE HE ISN'T ONE OF US WOULDN'T HE HAVE TO KNOW US?:

Is Obama's 'cool' too cold for ravaged Gulf? (Howard Fineman, 5/28/10, msnbc.com)

In fairness to Obama, he likely had no idea that he was being perceived this way. He doesn’t quite get it. And the reason we elected him was, in part, precisely because of his cool, sometimes almost chill, demeanor (coupled with his evident intelligence, studiousness and unflappability).

But if there was a time to flap, this was it.

At the end of the long and lugubrious hour, Obama conceded error and manned-up on the buck-stops-here question. “I take responsibility,” he said. “It’s my job to make sure that everything is done to shut” the well. “The federal government is fully engaged, and I’m fully engaged.”

As forthright as that was, much of the rest of the press conference was lawyerly, bureaucratic and political. At various times he blamed the Bush administration, the Congress, the past practices of the Minerals Management Service, the 1990 law under which he was “operating” and politics in general.

He half-way hung his interior secretary out to dry (a couple of times), saying that Ken Salazar had moved — but not fast enough — to change the culture of the famously corrupt and toothless MMS.

“Salazar came in and started cleaning house, but the culture had not fully changed in MMS ... There wasn't sufficient urgency in terms of the pace of how those changes needed to take place,” said the president, who later reiterated, “Ken Salazar was in the process of making these reforms ... obviously, they weren't happening fast enough. If they had been happening fast enough, this might have been caught.”

The president even claimed he didn’t know that the head of the MMS had just that morning been let go, an assertion that drew skepticism from his questioner and elicited from Obama the first broad grin I have ever seen that looked completely — I mean completely — disingenuous.