Yesterday morning I read that the CEO of BP, Tony Hayward said, “I want my life back.” I immediately thought, well, hundreds of thousands of Americans living on or near the Gulf Coast want their lives back too. And so does the pelican pictured above. However, the difference here is Mr. Hayward  goes back to a life of luxury..no worries about money, transportation, pensions, education for the kids, retirement. And now he longs to go back to a life of high profits and some ordinary corporate problems.

Meanwhile, the average American living on the Gulf Coast worries about; food, shelter,  retirement, education for the kids, the cost of travel. Oh, and one more thing…how they will make a living to support all of the above.

And for the wildlife, they are simply fighting for their lives, and they don’t know why.

For me, Mr. Hayward should never get his life back. He earns this huge amount of money for just this kind of crisis. And he is failing to earn it.

BP is suffering from a lack of leadership…leadership that its stockholders paid for. And every CEO should take note. You make the big money because when it comes time to lead, you do.

And that brings me to President Obama. His first test of leadership was the health insurance crisis and he rallied to lead. However, it was a slow developing issue where he and his advisors had plenty of time to analyze, plan, and act.

Well, the Gulf oil spill is different. And the President and his administration have failed. He did not get out in front of the issue, and he will now, never get in front of it. Quick decisive leadership was needed, and he did not have the mentality or the tools to get it done.

Which brings me to this.

Where was his vaunted new media people who were brilliant in his campaign? They collected hundreds of millions of dollars from citizens giving five, ten bucks a throw. And then engaged them by using new media. In real-time. Brilliantly.

Don’t you think if the Obama administration had a strong new media monitoring program in place that they would have picked up the oil worker tweet from the Deep Horizon rig saying, “I think we have a leak bigger than a thousand barrels a day”. Or a tweet from a first responder saying, “geeze, this is a mess.” And that information would then have gone directly to the decision makers in the administration.

The great thing about new media is you hear it from citizens on the scene, and not have it spoon-fed to you by a large corporation trying to control the information, and therefore the crisis.

New media monitoring would have put our federal government ahead of the issue, and provided leverage to deal with BP.

And new media monitoring would have allowed BP to understand that information was leaking out, and that, like the spill, it can not be contained for very long. Perhaps they would then have been more transparent.

New media would have kept both BP and the administration honest.

Meanwhile, BP continues to flail. It has now hired a Bush Administration official to head the public relations effort. Whew! I really don’t know where to begin. Anne Womack-Kolton, the former campaign press secretary for Vice President Dick Cheney is now in charge of the PR for the largest oil spill in history. She worked for and defended a secretive Vice President who had close ties with the oil industry and a distaste for the flow of information to the press.  This move is the opposite of “transparency”.

Last night, June 2nd,  at the White House, the Obama’s hosted Sir Paul McCartney who will receive the George Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. Stevie Wonder, the Jonas Brothers, and others entertained a chosen list of guests.

The President should be leading the clean-up effort. Leading from the Gulf Coast. At times, covered in oil, fishing pelicans out of the Gulf…along with the citizens down there.

Instead, his leadership is covered in oil…and the American people will not forget this, the deep water drilling that caused it, or the large corporation who insisted it was safe.