Tour Of Duty

President Obama has visited Louisiana to tour flood damaged areas, several days after the flood itself.  Media seems to be covering it like this:

Critics are complaining that Obama took too long to visit.  He was on vacation in Martha's Vineyard. Usually visiting disaster areas is part of the job of being president.  But he didn't visit because the Governor of Louisiana asked him not to until authorities had better control of the situation.

Um, isn't that kind of burying the lead?  You've got a story about the President not going to Louisiana, and you know why he didn't go to Louisiana, but you decide to take us on a tour of other explanations that you know aren't true.  In effect, you don't actually have a story, you have a perfectly ordinary situation.  It would be like this:

An Unidentified Object was seen in the skies last night.  It might be some sort of supernatural phenomena.  It could have been an alien spacecraft.  Many people claim to have been abducted by aliens.  But in this case, it was just a weather balloon.

Again, not actually a story: It's something boring that you've made into a story by being conveniently stupid.

But to look at it another way, it's not really "burying the lead" (or "lede," as some people apparently spell it.) That refers to leaving the interesting part of the story until the end.  In this case, you're putting the interesting part at the start, the way you're supposed to.  Instead, you're leaving the truth until the end. It's kind of like in televised sports, where they always show the replay from every bad angle first, then finally play it from the angle that everyone knew was going to be the best.

And I can understand why the Governor wouldn't want him to visit.  A visit by a President or any other high-ranking leader is a big production requiring lots of people.  It's a waste of precious effort for them to make a token trip to a devastated region.  Given that they can't actually do anything, it's little more than a photo-op, which is pretty selfish. So hopefully this will encourage a new tradition where leaders stay away from the immediate aftermath of disasters, and find some other ritual for the leader to demonstrate basic empathy .