Federal Judiciary

If nothing else, Pres. Barack Obama has made the presidency a bulwark against the emotionalism that has seeped into every corner of our national life.

You can?t even turn on a hockey game without seeing a broadcaster break down and cry. Former Chicago Blackhawks center and NBC analyst Jeremy Roenick choked up on air when the long-suffering Hawks won the Stanley Cup.

In this soggy cultural landscape, Obama has always been the calm, crisp standout. People may have lost their cool about him in 2008, but he never lost his. He matched his inspirational rhetoric with an emotional affect tending toward the aloof and even cold.

He was the last person you?d expect to utter a vulgarity in public, or go out of his way to express anger. Until the BP leak. Asked by Matt Lauer on the Today show why he was meeting with experts when he could be kicking butt, Obama said he?d been misinterpreted: ?I don?t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar. We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers so I know whose ass to kick.?

Obama may be the first ass-kicker who wants to consult with a Nobel Prize winner in physics, his energy secretary, Steven Chu, before he pile-drives anyone. This is taking technocratic government to an entire new level -- it?s the best and the brightest meets Jesse Ventura.

Obama?s kick-ass moment reeked of falsity and futility, two of the most undesirable political qualities. He caved to the mob of pundits demanding that he rise to the complex, wide-ranging challenge of the largest oil spill in U.S. history with a good fit of anger. Or, as Spike Lee wisely counseled, that he ?go off.?

This advice happened to run counter to all the plaudits Obama received when he ran for president for his first-class temperament and preternatural calm. Back then, Obama was precisely the man to take the helm in a crisis because he remained so unperturbed. John McCain, on the other hand, with his emotions on his sleeve, exposed himself as dangerously ?erratic.?

With so many of the erstwhile celebrants of his natural emotional style reversing course, Obama felt compelled to follow, even though it?s manifestly not who he is. By all accounts, Obama really does enjoy seminars for their own sake. He likes hearing out arguments. He?s analytic to a fault.

When he breaks out locker-room bravado, no one will be fooled. At least when Pres. George W. Bush vowed to get Osama bin Laden ?dead or alive? immediately after 9/11 -- a remark he came to regret -- it was authentic. Obama?s the synthetic ass-kicker.

He wouldn?t have gone there if he didn?t feel trapped. He?s getting hurt politically by an event over which he has limited control. Even if he assembled the smartest, best-credentialed ass-kicking experts from MIT and around the world, it?s not clear where Obama would direct his martial ire. The leak itself is a nearly impossible technical challenge impervious to presidential beat-downs. And BP is already getting its ass kicked all the way into bankruptcy.

All the calls for Obama to emote more -- and they began even before the spill -- speak to a deeper desperation. Obama may be the most left-wing president the country has ever had, yet is running into a wall of opposition in a center-right country. His supporters want to believe that if he only turns up the emotional heat, his agenda will become more popular. Raise the debt once more -- but with feeling!

It won?t work, and Obama will lose his dignity in the process. He represented a welcome relief from the emotive excesses of Bill Clinton and the often treacly ?compassionate? conservatism of George W. Bush. With Obama in the White House, we could be assured that there was at least one emotionally reserved person left in American public life.

Don?t blow it, Mr. President: Please, don?t feel our pain.

-- Rich Lowry is editor of National Review. © 2010 by King Features Syndicate.

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on June 11, 2010 (boomark / email).