What President Obama Should Learn From Star Trek

Matt Yglesias at Vox has written a post taking issue with my essay in the new Bloomberg Businessweek on Obama’s shaky crisis management. I argued that Obama tends to botch the initial response in a way that undermines public confidence and often exacerbates the problem, even if things generally turn out OK in the end. On Ebola, for instance, he insisted the odds of anyone in the U.S. contracting it were “extremely low”—right before two nurses were infected and the media (and much of the public) freaked out. I attribute this tendency to two things: Obama’s excess of faith in government’s ability to handle an emergency and an aversion to the public role of president that people need and expect in a national crisis—think Bush after 9/11 or Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombings.

Yglesias bases his objection on what happened after Republican Scott Brown won an upset victory in the 2010 U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts to replace Ted Kennedy, robbing Senate Democrats of a filibuster-proof majority. “[T]he political community was electrified by Brown’s triumph,” Yglesias writes. “But to most observers the stunner also had a very concrete significance—the drive to pass an Obamacare bill through the United States Congress was dead. Of course Republicans spun it that way. But many Democrats—including senior figures on and off Capitol Hill as well the President’s own chief of staff—agreed as well.” Obama wouldn’t hear of it. “He refused to give into the panic gripping the Democrats,” Yglesias writes. “And today Obamacare is law.”