In 1968, after CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite
formally came out against the Viet Nam war, President Lyndon B. Johnson was
apocryphally to have said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”
For the first Democratic President in this century,
that might apply to the celebrity gossip show TMZ, who upon learning that the
NASA website was down due to a budget not being passed, mocked the
administration’s blaming of it all on Republicans, stating, “Ann Romney: She’s
the reason we’re not able to make sure there’s still not water on Venus right
now.”
Americans and much of the media, ostensibly on the
side of the president before the shutdowns actually occurred, are now
ridiculing him right along with the Republicans in the House of Representatives.
When Chief Official White House photographer and Tweeter Pete Souza posted a
somber grayscale picture of a meeting in the Oval Office on the social
media site Twitter, Joe Weisenthal, Executive Editor Of Business Insider, was
prompted to
re-tweet, “Eek. Shutdown forcing photographs to be in black and white”. The
Department of Defense pitched in to help force a compromise, with the Navy
Twitter account announcing “Department of Defense suspends all
intercollegiate competitions at the Service Academies. Decision on AF-Navy
football will be made Thursday”, even though during the shutdown of 1995 all
the academies played because they don’t use federal dollars. Mt. Vernon, the home of our first president
George Washington, is privately owned so the administration can’t close that -
but they closed the parking lot.
Science has fared no better. The president who
promised to “restore science to its rightful place” has instead regards American
science as so unessential that only a few dozen of the National Science
Foundation’s 1,700 employees are as valuable as
the 436 people he needs just at the White House – in the case of the NSF, the
only essential employees are security guards and a few IT people to monitor the
site they took down anyway. NASA’s website also has a splash page lamenting the
budget crisis and The National Zoo's Giant Panda Cam is shut down. Fear not,
the Smithsonian Institution is still feeding animals, they are just adding to
the perception that government institutions are given lunch money each day. We’re
being told in media stories that science projects are being shuttered and that
a few days of government political theater mean years of setbacks. We’ve seen
all this before, of course. When President Bush compromised (remember when
presidents did that?) and allowed federal funding of human embryonic stem cell
research for existing lines, we were told he was preventing a cure for
Alzheimer’s – and former first lady Nancy Reagan was told that the Bush policy
might have prevented a breakthrough that would have cured her deceased husband.
When President Obama modified that federal limitation slightly in 2009, science
media declared the ‘ban’ lifted but immediately went about setting expectations
that breakthroughs could be decades away and that it was basic research. Food
outbreaks happen all of the
time yet suddenly it’s a
zombie apocalypse because the CDC didn’t send out an email about salmonella
like they always do. Oh wait, yes they did.
The poultry is safe to eat, you just have to make sure you cook it
properly, which is always the case with chicken. Still, if not for Republicans,
the complaint goes … well, what? Would anything the government is not doing have
prevented the salmonella concern? Nope.
If the president thinks science is essential, why
does he not declare it essential? 83% if the federal government is still working
and, since none of the federal workers not working will not be paid, we are not
saving any money. The reason not to
declare science essential is that it makes a big splash in the media. If calligraphy
needs to get done, a well-paid White House calligrapher will do it and it won’t
get noticed, but if science is hindered, it can get national coverage. 84% of
academia voted for him so they will blame Republicans no matter what; there is no downside for the administration.
Business is fine with the shutdown, of course.
Though environmental activists believe centralized government is the only way
to get things done and are sending out daily press releases claiming we’ll be a
toxic wasteland if government union employees are not everywhere, energy
companies know that is not happening, and no harm at all will come if something
like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission shuts down forever. The NRC being shut
down means the Obama administration now has a reason not to process the Yucca
Mountain plan they are obligated by law and court order to process but never
intend to process anyway. “Government is a hell of a lot more important to the
environmental groups than it is to businesses,” GOP and industry strategist
Mike McKenna told
Politico’s Darren Goode. Activists, who claim to care about nature, are
against efforts to fund things like workers at national parks who safeguard
nature, because they are “part of the apparatus of selling the administration’s
message,” said
industry lobbyist Scott Segal of Bracewell&Giuliani.
Technically, Johnson never agreed he lost America, but
he must have been thinking it. He was the last president not to seek reelection
and had a
disapproval rating of 52% in that
summer of 1968. President Obama is
only sitting at 48% disapproval so he probably feels okay, since
his predecessor George W. Bush had a 65% disapproval rating in 2006, two
years after he easily defeated his opponent. Was Bush that bad? No, Harry
Truman was the worst, yet no one now thinks of him as a bad president –
everyone says “the buck stops here” and the 1950s are regarded as an economic
Golden Age. So take heart, Mr. President. Reporters may be terrified you are
hacking into their emails and phone calls right now and New York Times chief
Washington correspondent David Sanger may say “This
is most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered” but history
should be kinder – for example, a whole lot of journalists suddenly wish Bush
were back in the White House.
