Obama’s getting mad — or is he?

June 9, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

First he was going to make BP pay for the Gulf oil mess. Then he declared himself in charge. Now he’s trying to find out “whose ass to kick” and making clear he’d fire BP’s chief if only he could.

President Barack Obama is talking tougher as the Gulf-oil-spill crisis drags on, the public’s patience wears thin and the peril to his presidency increases. With pressure building on Obama to fix the crisis, the White House said he’ll be heading back to the scene, spending next Monday and Tuesday inspecting oil damage in Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

Obama’s salty comments broadcast on NBC’s “Today” show Tuesday raised questions about his escalating anger and angst — are they real or calculated for political effect?

Long viewed as a political positive, Obama’s unflappable temperament may be working against him now. Despite his claims of being on top of things from Day One, Obama has come under fire even within his own party, accused of being slow to recognize the political danger of the spill and for appearing somewhat detached.

“I think it’s hard for him to get angry. His anger obviously is motivated by the fact that there’s increasing anger in the country,” said Thomas E. Cronin, a political scientist at Colorado College and co-author of a book “The Paradoxes of the American Presidency” that examines how difficult it is for presidents to live up to expectations.

“We want the president to be like us but to be better than us. So we hold the president to a higher standard,” said Cronin.

Obama’s dialing up his anger thermostat comes as a new Washington Post poll shows nearly half of those surveyed — 48 percent — now saying he does not understand the problems of people like them, the highest of his presidency.

And a new Pew Research Center poll shows a sharp rise in the number of people who say Obama’s policies are making the economy worse rather than better.

“There are increasing doubts about what he’s doing. And he’s got a world of troubles here, from BP to the economy to last week’s disappointing jobs report,” said Pew pollster Andy Kohut.

After earlier suggesting repeatedly that cleaning up the spill was BP’s full responsibility, Obama said at a May 27 news conference that he accepted responsibility for saving the situation. He also assailed a “scandalously close relationship” between Big Oil and its government regulators.

He said his daughter Malia had asked him that morning: “Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?”

A few days later, he called BP’s announcement of the failure of its “top kill” attempt to stop the leak “as enraging as it is heartbreaking.” Last Friday on his third trip to the Gulf Coast since the April 20 rig explosion, Obama worked to channel public anger toward BP. “I don’t want them nickel-and-diming people down here,” he said.

Then, in an interview recorded Monday and broadcast Tuesday, Obama said, “I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar; we talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers — so I know whose ass to kick.”

He also criticized BP CEO Tony Hayward for such insensitive remarks as “I want my life back,” and the Gulf is “a big ocean” so “the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest.”

“He wouldn’t be working for me after any of those statements,” Obama said.

Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs recently assured skeptical reporters that he’d personally seen the president express “rage” over the spill. When pressed for details, Gibbs spoke of Obama’s “clenched jaw” and an order at a staff meeting to “plug the damn hole.”

In a separate interview with The Associated Press, Gibbs said Obama does not intend to “get mad just to get mad,” that that wasn’t his style.