Tag Archives: Challenger disaster

national news

It’s the ‘optics’ that keep bedeviling the president

Donald J. Trump had to know about the damage done by his long-distance feud with San Juan, P.R., Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz.

The president surely knew it would be better for him to make nice with the mayor who he had criticized for her “poor leadership” after she criticized the federal response to Puerto Rico’s suffering in the wake of Hurricane Maria’s savage beating.

I fear he didn’t act on that when he went to Puerto Rico. He engaged in at least one peculiar public-relations stunt when he was video recorded tossing rolls of paper towels at a crowd of well-wishers. Someone will have to explain to me what that was supposed to tell us about the president’s concern for those U.S. citizens who are suffering from the hurricane’s devastation.

Then he sat in a meeting with local officials — which included Mayor Cruz — and said that Puerto Rico has cost the United States “billions of dollars, but that’s all right.” I heard that and thought, “Huh?”

The president keeps fluffing this part of his job description, the one that labels him “comforter in chief.”Ā  He’s not making the grade.

President Reagan donned that mantle perfectly after the shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986; President Clinton did it as well in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995; and of course, President Bush stood in the Twin Tower rubble, bullhorn in hand after 9/11, and said “the world will hear all of us soon.”

And can anyone forget the sight of President Obama leading a church congregation in a rendition of “Amazing Grace” at the memorial for the victims of the Charleston, S.C., massacre?

Trump hasn’t yet been able to demonstrate the capacity he needs to show in these times of intense national grief.

Puerto Ricans are suffering. Yet the president treats his visit there like some sort of performance on his part.

He’ll get another chance on Wednesday when he flies to Las Vegas. He’ll get an opportunity to show Americans he cares about that community’s suffering after the madman opened fire at the hotel and casino, killing 59 people and injuring 500-plus more in a hail of automatic weapon fire.

Do you have faith that the president will become comforter in chief?

Me, neither.

national news, political news

Huck is right about POTUS’s response to shooting

huck

Hell hasn’tĀ frozen over, but it’s a bit chillier down there this morning.

Why? Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee — a man with whom I rarely agree — offered a fascinating critique of President Obama’s immediate response to the Dallas shootings overnight.

The president, said Huckabee — himself a former Republican candidate for the highest office — politicized the event by introducing the topic of gun control during his statement on the killing of five Dallas law enforcement officers.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/mike-huckabee-dallas-shooting-obama-225280

The president, Huck said, needed to be more Reaganesque in his response. Huckabee recalled how President Reagan sought to bring the nation together after the Challenger shuttle tragedy. That, he said, ought to be the model for presidents to follow in this time of national grief.

As Politico reported: “During his statement earlier Friday morning in which he condemned the attack as ‘vicious, calculated and despicable,’ Obama remarked that ‘we also know that when people are armed with powerful weapons, unfortunately it makes it more deadly and more tragic, and in the days ahead we are going to have to consider those realities as well.”‘

Huckabee, of course, focused more on the latter part of that statement rather than the first part. But he does make a valid point about how presidents ought to react publicly to events such as this.

“He doesn’t need to inject the divisive arguments like gun control at a time of great grief for the nation,” Huckabee said. “And he ought to do for us what Ronald Reagan did after the Challenger disaster. And that’s remind us of what we have in common, not what separates us. And that’s why I’m always so frustrated. Barack Obama has such great potential to be a leader.”

The president has labeled the acts in Dallas correctly. They were “despicable,” “vicious” and “calculated.”

My hope now is that the president goes to Dallas and embraces the police department and the families of those who were struck down and offers words of healing to a nation that is stunned.

That, too, is how Ronald Reagan would react — and it’sĀ also what Barack Obama has done many timesĀ during his presidency.

national news

Boys kept out of White House queries

President Obama’s final press conference of 2014 made news in an unexpected manner.

Eight reporters asked him questions in the White House Press Room. All of them were women. Obama said at the outset he had checked his “naughty or nice” list when developing his list of questioners.

I guess the men among the White House press corps had been naughty.

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-answers-female-reporters–questions-only-at-year-end-press-conference-212200355.html

What’s the statement here? I haven’t a clue.

One of the other interesting elements of the roster of questioners was that most of them rarely, if ever, get a chance to ask the president something at one of these events. They were “unknowns.”

The “big hitters” among the White House press cadre — the men and women who get the front-row seats — comprise the major broadcast and cable news networks, along with The Associated Press, the pre-eminent print news outlet. They sat there stone-faced while Obama called out names of people sitting in the back of the room.

Actually, I thought it was rather cool for the president to call on those who don’t usually participate in these televised news conferences. It gives others whose job is to report on presidential events a chance to put their own questions on the record with the Leader of the Free World.

Enough of the major-media echo chamber, thank you very much.

***

A memory came to mind just as I was typing this post about “no-name journalists.” Here goes.

Back in the 1980s, NASA announced a plan to send a working journalist into space aboard a space shuttle mission. It then put the word out for any journalist who was interested to apply.

I applied for a spot on a shuttle mission. What an amazing opportunity to report first hand, up close, in real time the immense thrill of orbiting Earth from outer space. Hey, I could do this.

As it turned out, NASA scrubbed its “civilian in space” after the Challenger disaster in January 1986, when school teacher Christa McAuliffe died along with her crewmates.

But after I submitted my application to NASA, I was sharing my desire to fly in space with a colleague of mine at the Beaumont Enterprise, where I was working at the time. I mentioned to my friend, Rosemary Harty, that NASA likely would go with some big-name network TV news celebrity — someone like Walter Cronkite.

“Oh, no they won’t, John,” Rosey said. “They’re going to pick a nobody, just like you.”