Captains are back! Is Obama the next captain?

Howard Fineman • E-mail

WASHINGTON - Captains are back — as in Sullenberger and now Phillips — and with them, the idea that our leaders can be trusted to know what they are doing, and to do it.

If that radical notion takes hold in politics, it’s easy to see the beneficiary: President Barack Obama, who has dramatically and confidently taken the wheel of the ship of state and who acted calmly and carefully in the pirate standoff.

But it’s also easy to see the risk: Obama could conclude he has the right (and need) to issue commands to Congress and the country.

Before we start fretting, however, let’s stop to admire something we have come to regard as rare. It is the triumph of credentialed, licensed leadership.

Capt. Chesley “Sulley” Sullenberger III of U.S. Airways and Capt. Richard Phillips of the Maersk Alabama proved more than worthy of their titles and positions.

They were brave, capable, shrewd and deeply knowledgeable. They saved, respectively, 155 passengers on a plane that landed in the Hudson River last January, and 19 American shipmates trapped by pirates on a cargo vessel last week in the dangerous waters off the coast of East Africa.

The more you know about them the more you realize that they had prepared all of their lives for their fateful moments of crisis in the air and on the sea.

Sullenberger had an astonishing academic and military record at the Air Force Academy and had earned two graduate degrees in addition to logging 19,000 hours of flight time. He had a lifelong interest in gliders, and while a giant Airbus is by no means a glider, he in effect glided his passengers to safety.

If anyone could have prepared for pirates, Phillips did.

Trained at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, he was regarded as both gifted and studious. Peter Stalkus, a fellow maritime captain who has worked with him for 23 years, said Phillips is known as “the Larry Bird of Chief Mates,” according to the Boston Globe.

Video   Obama's full speech on the economy April 14: President Obama gives a speech on the economy at Georgetown University. MSNBC

While an old sea dog, with more than 30 years at sea, Phillips was also remarkably current, reading about and studying modern-day piracy. He monitored conditions off the African coast on the web when he wasn’t actually facing them at sea.

Their successes, miraculous as they were, were not accidents. These were real leaders.

Being a leader in America (and of Americans) has never been an easy task.

In our raucous, continental democracy, we tend to doubt — quickly — the very people we elevate. We ask: How can anyone be presumptuous enough to rise above us?

We have squared that circle with credentials. In our supposed meritocracy, people who lead are the people who earn the right to do so — not members of some hereditary class.

And yet we have spent more than a generation in this country disparaging even those with credentials – often with good reason.

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