Phoning it in?

This morning my very conservative local newspaper used the term "vilified" in a headline describing the way people on the ground in Haiti are supposedly feeling about the U.S.'s approach there. Fair or not, amid increasing suggestions that aid is not making it to the folks who need it fast enough, I thought it might be worth looking at a very different set of images than the ones we've been seeing from Haiti itself.

In recent days, the White House Flickr photostream has posted three Haiti-related images of President Obama. Presumably these are meant to illustrate that (unlike our previous president after Katrina) Obama is top of the situation. One (top) features Obama in a meeting in the White House situation room, while the other two depict him on the phone with U.S Ambassador to Haiti Kenneth Merten and Haitian president Rene Preval (middle and bottom, respectively). I find the middle picture compelling for the way that Childe Hassam's "Avenue in the Rain" seems to be coming out of Obama's mouth like a talk  bubble in a cartoon; perhaps a visualization of Obama's verbalization of American commitment to Haiti?

Taken together, though, these images implicitly illustrate a fundamental rhetorical problem when picturing certain kinds of presidential leadership: how do you picture your president as an active leader when the very act of acting requires him to do really important but visually unexciting things? (In writing of this as a problem, by the way, I don't mean to suggest that it's in any way remotely equivalent to the very real nightmare being lived in Haiti as I write this).

Put another way, what do viewers see when they look at these images? Do they see a president actively leading? Do they see the hard, slow work of government in action? Or do they see someone phoning it in?

Image credits: All photos by Pete Souza, White House photographer, Flickr photostream.

 

 

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[doudoune moncler]

Many of the horses had not had a saddle on them in eight months, while all of them had run idle during the winter in a large mesquite pasture and were in fine condition with the opening of spring. So bidding my folks farewell, I saddled at noon and took a cross-country course for the ranch, covering the hundred and odd miles in a day and a half. Reaching headquarters late at night, I found that active preparations had been going on during my absence.