A Year after SEAL Team Six took its heart-stopping tour of the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad and took out the world’s most evil man, we’re talking about who deserves the credit.
That didn’t really seem to be a subject of controversy a week ago, but it has become one now — and oddly, that’s due to the man who actually got the credit.
President Obama got it, and he should have gotten it. He made the call, he gets the credit and anyone who says he shouldn’t is blinded by unreasoning hatred.
Or maybe is annoyed by just how much President Obama is demanding that everybody give him the credit.
It’s getting to be like Jerry Lewis at the end of the telethon, begging with tears in his eyes for America’s love.
Apparently, the president and his team feel that the universal celebration of his leadership on the matter last year was insufficient. They want more. Now.
It’s understandable. Obama is running for re-election, and politicians running for re-election will use any advantage they can to win. This was the most popular decision of his life, and hitting people over the head with it on the occasion of an anniversary of something positive for them is just what politicians do.
But note this distinction: We’re talking here about Obama the politician, not Obama the president. Shnorring for credit is an understandable act for a politician. It’s a little discomfiting for a president.
Why is that?
It’s actually a leadership issue of a different kind from the decisiveness he showed in making the call last year. Even though he said he didn’t want to “spike the football,” spiking the football is fine — just so long as he makes it clear that he is America’s representative and that it’s America spiking the football, not just Barack Obama.
And what’s been missing over the past week is the appropriate show of humility — even if it is a false humility — of merely acting on the public’s behalf and with the public’s will.
More troubling, perhaps, is the implicit credit-grabbing here from others who work under him and take orders from him — whose numbers in this specific case probably reach into the thousands.
In his speeches and comments, the president is careful to mention the brave Americans who carried out the mission. But the job of taking out Osama bin Laden involved CIA personnel, military personnel and civilians working for the military who engaged in activities over the space of two years and thereby made the raid possible. So, expanding outward, did the efforts of Americans fighting in Afghanistan, more than 100,000 of them.
As both commander-in-chief and the head of the executive branch of the US government, Obama never acts alone. The call was his to make, but the execution of the policy both before the call and after it was not his work.
A certain degree of modesty is called for — and in that modesty, were it present, we might actually be able to locate a degree of heroism.
But not when he spikes the football. A year later.
And not when he does so in tandem with a peculiar accusation — that the man who is running against him for president would not have made the same call. It’s likely even he doesn’t actually think that.