Gulf oil disaster exposes a nation confused about the role of government

The failure of the top-kill technique in the Gulf of Mexico represents an interesting turning point on the Obama presidency. It symbolizes the end of the period of lightning advance and the beginning of the period of nasty stasis.

President Barack Obama swept into office having aroused the messianic hopes of his supporters. For the past 16 months he has been on nearly permanent offense, instigating action with the stimulus bill, Afghan policy, health-care reform and the nearly complete financial reform. Whether you approve or not, this has been an era of bold movement.

But now the troops are exhausted, the country is anxious, the money is spent and the Democratic majorities are teetering. The remaining pieces of legislation, on immigration and energy, are going nowhere. (The decision to do health care before energy is now looking extremely unfortunate.)

Meanwhile, the biggest problems are intractable. There's no sign we will be successful in preventing a nuclear Iran. Especially after Monday's events, there's no chance of creating a breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli dispute. Unemployment will not be coming down soon. The long-term fiscal crisis won't be addressed soon either.

In other words, if the theme of the past 16 months was large change, the theme of the next period will be gridlock and government's apparent impotence in the face of growing problems.

And, at this particular moment, we are confronted by the picture of an uncontrolled gusher of oil spewing destruction into the gulf. This image could be with us for another few months, searing into the national consciousness and becoming the defining image of 2010.

Everybody is comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, but the real parallel could be the Iranian hostage crisis. In the late 1970s, the hostage crisis became a symbol of America's inability to take decisive action in the face of pervasive problems. In the same way, the uncontrolled oil plume could become the objective correlative of the country's inability to govern itself.

The plume taps into a series of deep anxieties. First, it taps into the anxiety that the people running our major institutions are just not that competent. Second, it feeds into the anxiety that there has been an unhappy marriage between corporations and government officials, which has had the effect of corrupting both. Most important, the plume exposes the country's core confusion about the role of government.

When this country was born, the founders laid down strict roles for the federal government and the president. But over the years, the roles of government and the presidency have expanded.

As a matter of conviction, the country is deeply uncomfortable with these expansions. Operationally, on the other hand, the country has become accustomed to the new programs and to the new presidential role.

In times of crisis, you get a public reaction that is incoherence on stilts. On the one hand, most people know that the government is not in the oil business. They don't want it in the oil business. They know there is nothing a man in Washington can do to plug a hole a mile down in the gulf.

On the other hand, they demand that the president "take control." They demand that he hold press conferences, show leadership, announce that the buck stops here and do something. They want him to emote and perform the proper theatrical gestures so they can see their emotions enacted on the public stage.

They want to hold him responsible for things they know he doesn't control. Their reaction is a mixture of disgust, anger, longing and need. It may not make sense. But it doesn't make sense that the country wants spending cuts and doesn't want cuts, wants change and doesn't want change.

At some point somebody's going to have to reach a national consensus on the role of government. If this disaster teaches anything, it is that we are a venturesome, entrepreneurial society. We rely on corporations like BP to bring us energy. At the same time, it is clear that even well-meaning corporations sometimes take shortcuts when it comes to controlling pollution and protecting worker safety.

So we want government to regulate business. We want regulation to be strong enough to reduce risk but not so strong as to stifle innovation. We want regulators to work cooperatively but not be captured by those they monitor.

We have known, for a long time, that regulation is about balance. The proper regulatory regime has to be set case by case and year by year.

We should be able to build from cases like this one and establish a set of concrete understandings about what government should and shouldn't do. We should be able to have a grounded conversations based on principles 95 percent of Americans support. Yet that isn't happening. So the period of stagnations begins.

David Brooks is a regular columnist for The New York Times.