Howard Fineman: Obama's Could-Have-Been-Worse Presidency

The last time I was in the Roosevelt Room at the White House, President Obama was in the midst of a very visible crisis and I was not impressed by the man he had found to handle it. Oil was vomiting from BP's well in the Gulf of Mexico--cable TV was showing the ghastly flow live--but the federal official tasked with ending the siege, soon-to-be-retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, seemed way too ponderously bureaucratic for the job. In the Roosevelt Room, beneath a picture of the hard-charging TR, he sat stiffly at the conference table. In a laborious, jargon-cluttered presentation, Allen tried to convince me and other wise-guy reporters that he had everything under control. After all, he was the government's "national incident commander"! Most of us in the room were predictably hysterical. The gulf was dead, as was the way of life it supported. We tauntingly quoted Malia Obama: "Plug the hole, Daddy!" she'd said--a disaster movie in the making.

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