It's not about the anger, stupid.

It's about the passion.

Frank Rich, of whose work I'm usually not a fan -- I've tried, but he seems to deliberately insult those not in partisan lockstep with him -- absolutely spanks it out of the park today:

It’s this misplaced trust in elites both outside the White House and within it that seems to prevent Obama from realizing the moment that history has handed to him.

Americans are still seething at the bonus-grabbing titans of the bubble and at the public and private institutions that failed to police them. But rather than embrace a unifying vision that could ignite his presidency, Obama shies away from connecting the dots as forcefully and relentlessly as the facts and Americans’ anger demand.

BP’s recklessness is just the latest variation on a story we know by heart. The company’s heedless disregard of risk and lack of safeguards at Deepwater Horizon are all too reminiscent of the failures at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and A.I.G., where the richly rewarded top executives often didn’t even understand the toxic financial products that would pollute and nearly topple the nation’s economy.

BP’s reliance on bought-off politicians and lax, industry-captured regulators at the M.M.S. mirrors Wall Street’s cozy relationship with its indulgent overseers at the S.E.C., Federal Reserve and New York Fed — not to mention Massey Energy’s dependence on somnolent supervision from the Mine Safety and Health Administration.
...
If Obama is to have a truly transformative presidency, there could be no better catalyst than oil. Standard Oil jump-started Progressive Era trust-busting. Sinclair Oil’s kickback-induced leases of Wyoming’s Teapot Dome oilfields in the 1920s led to the first conviction and imprisonment of a presidential cabinet member (Harding’s interior secretary) for a crime committed while in the cabinet. The Arab oil embargo of the early 1970s and the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989 sped the conservation movement and search for alternative fuels. The Enron scandal prompted accounting reforms and (short-lived) scrutiny of corporate Ponzi schemes.

This all adds up to a Teddy Roosevelt pivot-point for Obama, who shares many of that president’s moral and intellectual convictions. But Obama can’t embrace his inner T.R. as long as he’s too in thrall to the supposed wisdom of the nation’s meritocracy, too willing to settle for incremental pragmatism as a goal, and too inhibited by the fine points of Washington policy debates to embrace bold words and bold action. If he is to wield the big stick of reform against BP and the other powerful interests that have ripped us off, he will have to tell the big story with no holds barred.

You see, unless I'm reading the country wrong, it doesn't matter whether you're red state or blue state, a recently rooted American or if the streets in town were named after your people: we want a stronger and more independent America. We want to fight back, not get in bed with these people.

The corporate values currently leading the country, this "too big to fail" mentality, is choking off any hopes of incremental growth for those Americans willing to seize opportunities, sacrifice, and mix time with their talents while patiently building results and living within their means. But dreams die when we're all called to account paying off the bills of the big boys who risked big and lost, and were unable to cover their bets.

Some people put their faith in candidate Obama's promises of change this past election. Some people bought into the "outsider coming to clean house" narrative that dates back to overturning tables in the temples. Some saw what they wanted: a skinny black John Wayne, say, combining brains with a brashness uniquely American.

Our oldsters as well as our youngsters knew something different had to be done: the second Bush presidency, and our foreign and financial entanglements, exposed the myths of superpower dominancy and our own "too big to fail" entitlement mentality that the Boom generation has been raised on.

Yet here we are: no more averting our eyes to the results of our risk taking. The people don't want a Daddy, and what's really silly is to say that those who want a passionate response and a ... well, defense have unmet psychological needs.* He needent be a black John Wayne, but somehow, he's got to start fighting.

Nevermind who gets credit -- Who Shot Liberty Valance? -- the collective actions of the little guys still count. Even if just in the voting booth.

The sooner our president demonstrates via his actions and his priorities that he understand Rich's point above, the sooner the American people can trust that we've got leaders capable of actually leading people and not just scoring good grades, winning praises and rewards, and landing lucrative positions based on all that promise.

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Collins and Brooks, 5/26/10:

Gail Collins: If TV trivia doesn’t work, let’s go with the oil disaster. We agreed a few weeks back that Obama was handling it well. Now, although I don’t see what he could have done different, it doesn’t feel as if it’s going to go down in history as one of the great achievements of the administration.

The chattering class seems to feel Obama should be acting angrier, which doesn’t do much for me. I’m tired of making judgments about the way somebody appears, rather than what he’s actually done. Although I cannot promise I will never again make fun of worthy politicians who get into silly situations.

David Brooks: I persist in the belief that unless Barack Obama has a degree in underwater engineering that he’s not telling anybody about, there’s really not a lot, post-spill, he could be doing. Like you, I’m not a huge fan of presidential grandstanding. The idea that the president is the big national daddy who can take care of all our problems is silly.

ADDED:
I found this concession a bit troubling too:

But the real issue has to do with risk assessment. It has to do with the bloody crossroads where complex technical systems meet human psychology.

Over the past decades, we’ve come to depend on an ever-expanding array of intricate high-tech systems. These hardware and software systems are the guts of financial markets, energy exploration, space exploration, air travel, defense programs and modern production plants.

These systems, which allow us to live as well as we do, are too complex for any single person to understand. Yet every day, individuals are asked to monitor the health of these networks, weigh the risks of a system failure and take appropriate measures to reduce those risks.

If there is one thing we’ve learned, it is that humans are not great at measuring and responding to risk when placed in situations too complicated to understand.

Resign before you wave that white flag on behalf of the rest of us? Surrendering to corporate bigness now is exactly the opposite response we want to be undertaking.

Truth be told: the world is round, and what goes around tends to come around. Whether it's oil gushing unchecked and unknown toxins being dumped into the food chain, or ill-advised international actions that indeed have worldwide consequences.

Nobody said this would be a Sunday picnic: gird those loins, Mr. President, and for heaven's sake, surround yourself with those Americans who still believe in playing defense and not those who would have us surrender to supposedly superior forces...