Nobel Leadership in the Gulf

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is no fan of the federal response to the Gulf oil spill. National Journal reports that in his new book, Leadership and Crisis, Jindal can't resist taking a whack at the Obama administration for relying on smart people to seek to address the effects of the spill.

"They believed that the elite could fix everything," he writes. "It struck me during our conversations how often the president mentioned that his Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, won the Nobel Prize. Good for him. But just how exactly was this medal going to fix the problem, cap the well, and keep the oil off our coastline?"

Certainly, winning a Nobel Prize is no guarantee that a person will be an effective leader, especially in the government context, but there's a fair amount of evidence that Chu did a pretty good job in the response effort.