Joseph Lane: Being President and Saying "I'm Sorry": Obama's Mea Culpa
You can stop the watch: the time from his inauguration to President Obama’s first mea culpa clocked in at exactly two weeks.
He did not leave anything to chance, taking responsibility on the evening news with all the major network news anchors, and doing so repeatedly.
Of course, President Obama’s decision to personally accept responsibility for making mistakes in the appointment of the tax delinquency-plagued Tom Daschle to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services, as well as Nancy Killefer’s appointment to serve as Chief Performance Officer at the OMB, comes considerably more quickly than President Bush 43’s first admission of culpable error. We’re still waiting on that one (8 years, 2 weeks, and counting), but we will be sure to tell Linda Grabel about it when it happens. She was the woman who asked the most telling question at the Second Presidential Debate in 2004:
“President Bush, during the last four years, you have made thousands of decisions that have affected millions of lives. Please give three instances in which you came to realize you had made a wrong decision, and what you did to correct it.”
President Bush 43 danced all around that, coming up well short of one instance, and not even pretending to count off three. He pontificated on the difference between tactics and strategy, defended his tax cuts, and closed with the beautiful, little nugget of evasion – “Now, you asked what mistakes. I made some mistakes in appointing people, but I’m not going to name them. I don’t want to hurt their feelings on national TV. But history will look back, and I’m fully prepared to accept any mistakes that history judges to my administration, because the president makes the decisions, the president has to take the responsibility.”
President Obama has apparently decided that it is best to take responsibility for his decisions in present time, and he used those words – “it is my responsibility” – repeatedly in his interviews that aired this evening.
What exactly he is responsible for may be less clear:
Was he taking responsibility for appointing Daschle (and Killefer, and maybe even Geithner, who is now confirmed) without proper due diligence? Was he taking responsibility for failing to realize the gravity of the problem when he said, only yesterday, that he was “absolutely” standing by the Daschle nomination? Is he taking responsibility for some deeper error in judgment, perhaps failing to appreciate that he could not build a different type of administration from the same people who served in the old type of administrations? Was this a signal that he will look for a different type of appointee now and not just that he plans to hire more forensic accountants to work on the background checks?
We will have to wait to see just what President Obama’s forthright admission means going forward, but it is clear that he plans to avoid both Bush 43 obduracy and the Clintonian passive voice (“mistakes were made”).
He assured the American people that he planned to learn from mistakes and that he did not plan to repeat them. Even though we don’t yet know just how he will proceed differently, a great deal hinges on just how this early, almost preemptive, apology plays.
If President Obama is able to use the Daschle appointment as a cautionary lesson in the difficulties associated with changing the way that we do business in Washington and if he finds a candidate who proves both up to standards of moral probity and the considerable legislative challenges of steering health care reform through Congress, future presidents may huddle with their advisors to pick just when and how to issue that critical first apology: “You have to show the people that you know, even as president, that you are human being. We need to be clear – you screwed up, and you are willing to admit it. This has to be credible!”
If not, well, knowing mistakes were made may be the only first step that we ever see for dealing with problems.