WASHINGTON - The president is upset. Very upset. Frustrated and angry. Seething about the government's handling of Ebola, said a recent front-page headline in The New York Times.
There's only one problem with this pose, so obligingly transcribed for him by the Times. It's his government. He's president. Has been for six years. Yet Barack Obama reflexively insists on playing the shocked outsider when something goes wrong within his own administration.
IRS? "It's inexcusable, and Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it," he thundered in May 2013 when the story broke of the agency targeting conservative groups. "I will not tolerate this kind of behavior in any agency."
Except that within nine months, Obama had grown far more tolerant, retroactively declaring this to be a phony scandal without "a smidgen of corruption."
Obamacare rollout? "Nobody is more frustrated by that than I am," said an aggrieved Obama about the botching of the central element of his signature legislative achievement.
Veterans Affairs scandal? Presidential Chief of Staff Denis McDonough explained: "Secretary [Eric] Shinseki said yesterday ... that he's mad as hell and the president is madder than hell." A nice touch -- taking anger to the next level.
The president himself declared: "I will not stand for it."
The one scandal where you could credit the president with genuine anger and obliviousness involves the recent breaches of White House Secret Service protection.
These shows of calculated outrage -- and thus distance -- are becoming not just unconvincing but unamusing. In our system, the president is both head of state and head of government. Obama seems to enjoy the monarchial parts, but when it comes to the actual business of running government, he shows little interest and even less aptitude.
His principal job, after all, is to administer the government and to get the right people to do it. (That's why we typically send governors rather than senators to the White House.) That's called management. Obama had never managed anything before running for the biggest management job on earth. It shows.
What makes the problem even more acute is that Obama represents not just the party of government but a grandiose conception of government as the prime mover of social and economic life. The very theme of his presidency is that government can and should be trusted to do great things. And therefore society should be prepared to hand over large chunks of its operations -- from health care (one-sixth of the economy) to carbon regulation down to free contraception -- to the central administrative state.
When it turns out that vast, faceless bureaucracies tend to be incapable, inadequate, hopelessly inefficient and often corrupt, Obama resorts to expressions of angry surprise.
He must. He's not simply protecting his own political fortunes. He's trying to protect faith in the entitlement state by portraying its repeated failures as shocking anomalies.
Unfortunately, the pretense has the opposite effect. It produces not reassurance but anxiety. Obama's determined detachment conveys the feeling that nobody's home. No one leading. Not even from behind.
With events in the saddle and a sense of disorder growing -- the summer border crisis, Ferguson, the rise of the Islamic State, Ebola -- the nation expects from the White House not miracles but competence. At a minimum, mere presence. An observer presidency with its bewildered-bystander pose only adds to the unease.
The Washington Post Writers Group